LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Shelf ^11-^. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



V 



s. 



ESSAYS IN MINIATURE 




AGNES REPPLIER 





BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1895 



r 



^'-, 



Copyright, i8g2, 
By CHARLES L. WEBSTER & CO. 

Copyright, 1S95, 
By AGNES REPPLIER. 



AU rights reserved. 



]j,.|'i?<^l 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass. , U. S. A . 
Electrotypcd and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Our Friends, The Books ......... ii 

Trials of a Publisher 28 

The Oppression of Notes 45 

Conversation in Novels 59 

A Short Defence of Villains 70 

A By-Way in Fiction 87 

Comedy of the Custom House ....... 104 

Mr. Wilde's Intentions » . . 121 

Humors of Gastronomy 129 

Children in Fiction i44 

Three Famous Old Maids 157 

The Charm of the Familiar I7i 

Old World Pets ......' 182 

Battle of the Babies . 195 

The Novel of Incident 207 

Ghosts - 218 



ESSAYS IN MINIATURE 



OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 

'' I ^HERE is a short paragraph in Hazlitt's 
-^ Conduct of Life that I read very often, 
and always with fresh delight. He is offering 
much good counsel to a little lad at school, and 
when he comes to a matter upon which most 
counselors -are wont to be exceedingly didac- 
tic and diffuse — the choice of books — he con- 
denses all he has to say into a few wise and 
gentle words that are well worth taking to 
heart : 

" As to the works you will have to read by 
choice or for amusement, the best are the com- 
monest. The names of many of them are al- 
ready familiar to you. Read them as you grow 
up with all the satisfaction in your power, and 



II 



12 OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 

make much of them. It is perhaps the great- 
est pleasure you will have in life, the one )-ou 
will think of longest, and repent of least. If 
my life had been more full of calamity than it 
has been (much more than yours, I hope, will 
be) I would live it over again, my poor little 
boy, to have read the books I did in my 
youth." 

In all literature there is nothing truer or 
better than this, and its sad sincerity contrasts 
strangely with the general tone of the essay, 
which is somewhat in the manner of Lord Ches- 
terfield. But here, at least, Hazlitt speaks with 
the authority of one whose books had ever 
been his friends; who had sat up all night as a 
child over Paul and Virgiiiiay and to whom the 
mere sight of an odd volume of some good old 
English author, on a street stall, brought back 
with keen and sudden rapture the flavor of 
those early joys which he remembered longest, 
and repented least. His words ring consoling- 
ly in these different days, when we have not 
only ceased reading what is old, but when — a 
far greater misfortune — we have forgotten how 



OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 1 3 

to read ''with all the satisfaction in our pow- 
er," and with a simple surrendering of ourselves 
to the pleasure which has no peer. There are 
so many things to be considered now besides 
pleasure, that we have well-nigh abandoned 
the effort to be pleased. In the first place, it 
is necessary to " keep up " with a decent pro- 
portion of current literature, and this means 
perpetual labor and speed, whereas idleness 
and leisure are requisite for the true enjoyment 
of books. In the second place, few of us are 
brave enough to withstand the pressure which 
friends, mentors and critics bring to bear upon 
us, and which effectually crushes anything like 
the weak indulgence of our own tastes. The 
reading they recommend being generally in the 
nature of a corrective, it is urged upon us with 
little regard to personal inclination; in fact, the 
less we like it, the greater our apparent need. 
There are people in this world who always in- 
sist upon others remodeling their diet on a 
purely hygienic basis; who entreat us to avoid 
sweets or acids, or tea or coffee, or whatever 
we chance to particularly like; who tell us per- 



14 OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 

suasively that cress and dandelions will purify 
our blood; that celery is an excellent febri- 
fuge; that shaddocks should be eaten for the 
sake of their quinine, and fish for its phospho- 
rus; that stewed fruit is more wholesome than 
raw; that rice is more nutritious than potatoes; 
— who deprive us, in a word, of that hearty hu- 
man happiness which should be ours when din- 
ing. Like Mr. Woodhouse, they are capable 
of having the sweetbreads and asparagus car- 
ried off before our longing eyes, and baked ap- 
ples provided as a substitute. 

It is in the same benevolent spirit that kind- 
hearted critics are good enough to warn us 
against the books we love, and to prescribe for 
us the books we ought to read. With robust 
assurance they offer to give our tutelage their 
own personal supervision, and their disinterest- 
ed zeal carries them occasionally beyond the 
limits of discretion. I have been both amazed 
and gratified by the lack of reserve with which 
these unknown friends have volunteered to 
guide my own footsteps through the perilous 
paths of literature. They are so urgent, too. 



OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 15 

not to say severe, in their manner of proffer- 
ing assistance : *' To Miss Repplier we would 
particularly recommend "—and then follows a 
list of books of which I dare say I stand in 
open need; but which I am naturafly indis- 
posed to consider with much kindness, thrust 
upon me, as they are, like paregoric or a por- 
ous plaster. If there be people who can take 
their pleasures medicinally, let them read by 
prescription and grow fat ! But let me rather 
keep for my friends those dear and familiar 
volumes which have given me a large share of 
my life's happiness. If they are somewhat an- 
tiquated and out of date, I have no wish to 
flout their vigorous age. A book, Hazlitt re- 
minds us, is not, like a woman, the worse for 
being old. If they are new, I do not scorn 
tliem for a fault which is common to all their 
kind. Paradise Lost was once new, and was 
regarded as a somewhat questionable novelty. 
If they come from afar, or are compatriots of 
my own, they are equally well-beloved. There 
can be no aliens in the ranks of literature, no 
National prejudice in an honest enjoyment of 



\ 



l6 OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 

art. The book, after all, and not the date or 
birthplace of its author, is of material impor- 
tance. " It seems ungracious to refuse to be a 
terrce films y' s^iys Mr. Arnold; "but England 
is not all the world." Neither, for that matter, 
is America, nor even Russia. The universe is 
a little wider and a little older than -we are 
pleased to think, and to have lived long and 
traveled far does not necessarily imply inferi- 
ority. The volume that has crossed the seas, 
the volume that has survived its generation, 
stand side by side with their new-born Amer- 
ican brother, and there is no lack of harmony 
in such close companionship. Books of every 
age and of every nation show a charming 
adaptability in their daily intercourse; and, if 
left to themselves, will set off each other's 
merits in the most amiable and disinterested 
manner, each one growing better by contact 
with its excellent neighbor. It is only when 
the patriotic critic comes along, and stirs u]) 
dissensions in their midst, that this peaceful 
atmosphere is rent with sudden discord; that 
the luiglish book grows disdainful and super- 



OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 1/ 

cilious; the American, aggressive and sarcas- 
tic; the French, malicious and unkind. It is 
only when we apply to them a test which is 
neither wise nor worthy that they show all 
their bad qualities, and afford a wrangling 
ground for the ill-natured reviewers of two 
continents. 

There is a story told of the Russian poet, 
Pushkin, which I like to think true, because it 
is so pretty. When he was carried home fatal- 
ly wounded from the duel which cost him his 
life, his young wife, who had been the inno- 
cent cause of the tragedy, asked him whether 
there were no relatives or friends whom he 
wished to see summoned to his bedside. The 
dying man lifted his heavy eyes to the shelf 
where stood his favorite books, and murmured 
faintly in reply, ^' Farewell, my friends." 
When we remember that Pushkin lived before 
Russian literature had become a great and dis- 
piriting power, when we realize that he had 
never been ordered by critics to read Turgue- 
neff, never commanded severely to worship 
Tolsto'i or be an outcast in the land, never 



l8 OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 

even reveled in the dreadful gloom of Dos- 
toievsky, it seems incredible to the well-in- 
structed that he should have loved his books 
so much. It is absolutely afflicting to think- 
that many of these same volumes were foreign, 
were romantic, perhaps even cheerful in their 
character; that they were not his mentors, his 
disciplinarians, his guides to a higher and sad- 
der life, but only his '* friends." Why, Hazlitt 
himself could have used no simpler term of 
endearment. Charles Lamb might have ut- 
tered the very words when he closed his pa- 
tient eyes in the dull little cottage at Edmon- 
ton. Sir Walter Scott might have murmured 
them on that still September morn when the 
clear rippling of the Tweed hushed his tired 
heart to rest. I think that Shelley bade some 
swift, unconscious farewell to all the dear de- 
lights of reading, when he thrust into his pock- 
et the little volume of Keats, with its cover 
bent hastily backward, and rose, still dreamy 
with fairy-land, to face a sudden death. I 
think that Montaigne bade farewell to the 
fourscore " every-day books" that were his 



OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS I9 

chosen companions, before turning serenely 
away from the temperate pleasures of life. 

For all these men loved literature, not con- 
tentiously, nor austerely, but simply as their 
friend. All read with that devout sincerity 
which precludes petulance, or display, or let- 
tered asceticism, the most dismal self-torment 
in the world. In that delicious dialogue of 
Landor's between Montaigne and Scaliger, the 
scholar intimates to the philosopher that his 
library is somewhat scantily furnished, and 
that he and his father between them have writ- 
ten nearly as many volumes as Montaigne pos- 
sesses on his shelves. " Ah ! " responds the 
sage with gentle malice, "to write them is 
quite another thing ; but one reads books with- 
out a spur, or even a pat from our Lady 
Vanity." 

Could anything be more charming, or more 
untrue than this ? Montaigne, perched tran- 
quilly on his Guyenne hill-slope, may have 
escaped the goad ; but we, the victims of our 
swifter day, know too well how remorselessly 
Lady Vanity pricks us round the course, Are 



20 OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 

we not perpetually showing our paces at her 
command, and under the sharp incentive of 
her heel ? Yet Charles Lamb, in the heart of 
London, preserved by some fine instinct the 
same intellectual freedom that Montaigne 
cherished in sleepy Gascony. He too was 
fain to read for pleasure, and his unswerving 
sincerity is no less enviable than the clearness 
of his literary insight. Indeed, while many of 
his favorite authors may have no message for 
our ears, yet every line in which he writes his 
love is pregnant with enjoyment ; every word 
expresses subtly a delicious sense of satisfac- 
tion. The soiled and torn copies of Tom 
Jones and TJic Vicar of Wakefield from the 
circulating library, which speak eloquently 
to him of the thousand thumbs that have 
turned over each well-worn page ; the " kind- 
hearted play-book " which he reaches down 
from some easy shelf; the old Toivn and 
Cotintry Magazine which he finds in the win- 
dow-seat of an inn ; the " garruhnis, pleasant 
history" of Burnet ; the " beautiful, bare nar- 
rative " of Robinson Crusoe ; the antiquated, 



OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 21 

time-stained edition of '' that fantastic old 
great man," Robert Burton ; the Folio Beau- 
mont and Fletcher — all these and many more 
are Lamb's tried friends, and he writes of them 
with lingering affection. He is even able, 
through some fine choice of words, to convey 
to us the precise degree and quality of pleasure 
which they yield him, and which he wins us to 
share, not by exhortations or reproaches, but 
gently, with alluring smiles, and hinted prom- 
ises of reward. How craftily he holds each 
treasured volume before our eyes ! How apt 
the brief, caressing sentence in which he sings 
its praises ! — " The sweetest names, and which 
carry a perfume in the mention, are Kit Mar- 
lowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, 
and Cowley." " Milton almost requires a 
solemn service of music to be played before 
you enter upon him. Who listens, had need 
bring docile thoughts, and purged ears." 
'' Winter evenings — the world shut out — with 
less of ceremony the gentle Shakespeare en- 
ters. At such a season, the Tempest, or his 
own Winter s Tale'' 



22 OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 

In fact, the knowledge of when to read a 
book is ahnost as valuable as the knowledge of 
what book to read, and Lamb, as became a 
true lover of literature, realized instinctively 
that certain hours and certain places seem 
created expressly for the supreme enjoyment 
of an author, who yields to these harmonious 
surroundings his best and rarest gifts. To 
pick up Tlie Faerie Qiieene as a stop-gap in the 
five or six impatient minutes before dinner, to 
carry Candide into the ''serious avenues" of a 
cathedral, to try and skim over Richardson 
when in the society of a lively girl — Lamb 
knew too well, that these unholy feats are the 
accomplishments of an intellectual acrobat, 
not of a modest and simple-hearted reader. 
Hazlitt also was keenly alive to the influences 
of time and place. His greatest delight in por- 
ing over the books of his 3^u th la)' in the 
many recollections they arou^B of scenes and 
moments rich in vanished jo}'s. He opened a 
faded, dusty volume, and behold ! the spot 
where first he read it, the day it was received, 
the feeling of the air, the fields, the sky, all re- 



OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 23 

turned to him with charming distinctness, and 
with them returned his first rapturous impres- 
sion of that long-closed, long-neglected ro- 
mance : '* Twenty years are struck off the list, 
and I am a child again." Mr. Pater lays 
especial emphasis on the circumstances under 
which our favorite authors are read. '*A 
book," he says, " like a person, has its fortunes 
with one ; is lucky or unlucky in the precise 
moment of its falling in our way ; and often, 
by some happy accident, ranks with us for 
something more than its independent value." 
Thus it is that Marius and Fabian, nestled in 
the ripened corn amid the cool brown shadows, 
receive from the Golden Ass of Apuleius a 
strange keen pleasure ; each lad taking from 
the story that which he is best fitted to absorb ; 
each lad as unmindful of the other's feelings as 
of the grosser elements in the tale. For 
without doubt'ift book has a separate mes- 
sage for every reader, and tells him, of good 
or evil, that which he is able to hear. Plato, 
indeed, complains of all books that they lack 
reticence or propriety toward different classes 



24 OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 

of persons, and his protest embodies the aver- 
sion of the flexible Greek mind for the pre- 
cision of written literature. A poem or an 
oration which, crystallized into characters, 
speaks to all alike, and reveals itself indiscrim- 
inately to everybody, is of less value to the 
ancient scholar than the poem or oration 
which lingers in the master's mind, and main- 
tains a delicate reserve toward the inferior 
portion of the community. Plato is so far re- 
moved from the modern spirit which seeks to 
persuade the multitude to read Shakespeare 
and Milton, that he practically resents their 
peering with rude, but pardonable curiosity, 
into the stately domains of genius. We have 
now grown so insistently generous in these 
matters that our unhappy brothers, harassed 
beyond endurance, may well envy the plebeian 
Greeks their merciful limitations ; or wish, with 
the little girl in Puiicli, that flBby had lived in 
the time of Charles II., " for then education 
was very much neglected." But strive as we 
may, we cannot coerce great authors into uni- 
versal complaisance. Plato himself, were he 



OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 2$ 

SO unfortunate as to be living now, would rec- 
ognize and applaud their manifest reserves. 
Even to the elect they speak with varying 
voices, and it is sometimes difficult to believe 
that all have read alike. When G?ij/ Manner- 
ing was first given to the public, who awaited 
it with frantic eagerness, Wordsworth thought- 
fully observed that it was a novel in the style 
of Mrs. Radcliffe. Murray, from whom one 
expects more discernment, wrote to Hogg that 
Meg MeriHlies was worthy of Shakespeare ; 
" but all the rest of the novel might have been 
written by Scott's brother, or any other body." 
Blackwood, about the same time, wrote to 
Murray : *' If Walter Scott be the author of 
Guy Mannering, he stands far higher in this 
line than in his former walk." One of these 
verdicts has been ratified by time, but who 
could suppose that Julia Mannering and honest 
Dandy Dinmont would ever have whispered 
such different messages into listening ears ! 

And it is precisely because of the indepen- 
dence assumed by books, that we have need to 
cherish our own independence in return. They 



26 OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 

will not all be our friends, and not one of them 
will give itself freely to us at the dictation of 
a peremptory critic. Hazlitt says nobly of a 
few great writers, notably Milton and Burke, 
that " to have lived in the cultivation of an in- 
timacy with such works, and to have familiarly 
relished such names, is not to have lived in 
vain." This is true, }^et if we must seek for 
companionship in less august circles, there are 
many milder lights who shine with a steady 
radiance. It is not the privilege of every one 
to love so great a prose writer as Burke, so 
great a poet as Milton. "An appreciation of 
Paradise Lost,'' says Mr. Mark Pattison, "is 
the reward of exquisite scholarship;" and the 
number of exquisite scholars is never very 
large. To march up to an author as to the 
cannon's mouth is at best but unprofitable her- 
oism. To take our pleasures dutifully is the 
least likely way to enjoy them. The laws of 
Crete, it is said, were set to music, and sung 
as alluringly as possible after dinner; but I 
doubt if they afforded a really popular pastime. 
The well-fed guests who listened to such dec- 



OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 27 

orous chants applauded them probably from 
the standpoint of citizenship, rather than from 
any undisguised sentiment of enjoyment, and 
a few degenerate souls must have sighed occa- 
sionally over the joys of a rousing and unseem- 
ly chorus. We of to-day are so rich in laws, 
so amply disciplined at every turn, that we 
have no need to be reminded at dinner of our 
obligations. A kind-hearted English critic 
once said that reading was not a duty, and 
had therefore no business to be made disagree- 
able; and that no man was under any obliga- 
tion to read what another man wrote. This is 
an old-fashioned point of view, which has lost 
favor of late years, but which is not without 
compensations of its own. If the office of lit- 
erature be to make glad our lives, how shall we 
seek the joy in store for us save by following 
Hazlitt's simple suggestion, and reading ''with 
all the satisfaction in our power " ^ And how 
shall we insure this satisfaction, save by ignor- 
ing the restrictions imposed upon us, and cul- 
tivating, as far as we can, a sincere and pleas- 
urable intercourse with our friends, the books ? 



TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 

T N reading the recently published Memoirs 
-■- and Coi'respondence of JoJin Ulnrray, a 
very interesting and valuable piece of biog- 
raphy — albeit somewhat lengthy for these 
hurried days — we are forcibly impressed with 
one surprising truth which we A\ere far from 
suspecting in our ignorance — namely, that the 
publisher's life, like the policeman's, is not a 
happy one, but filled to the brim with vexa- 
tions peculiarly his own. It was as much the 
fashion in Murray's time as it is in ours to be- 
wail the hard fate of down -trodden authors, 
and to hint that he who prints the book ab- 
sorbs the praise and profit which belong in 
justice to him who writes it. In fact, that 
trenchant and time-honored jest, "Now Barab- 
bas was a publisher," dates from this halcyon 
period when Mari/iion \\as sold for a thousand 

guineas, and the third canto of Childe Harold 

28 



TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 29 

for nearly twice that sum. Murray himself 
possessed such influence in the literary world 
that the battle with the public was thought to 
be half won when a book appeared armed with 
the sanction of his name. He was a man of 
wealth, too, of social standing, of severe and 
fastidious tastes; exactly fitted by circum- 
stances, if not by nature, to play the autocratic 
role popularly assigned to all his craft, to crush 
the aspiring poet in the dust, to freeze the bud- 
ding genius who sought assistance at his hands, 
to override with haughty arrogance the wan 
and needy scholar who waited at his door. 
Instead of this, we see him enduring with 
lamblike gentleness an amount of provocation 
which would have hallowed a mediaeval saint, 
and which seems to our undisciplined spirits 
as wantonly exasperating and malign. 

In the first place, his Scotch allies. Con- 
stable and the ever-sanguine James Ballan- 
tyne, appeared to have looked upon the Eng- 
lish firm as an inexhaustible mine of wealth, 
from which they could, when convenient, 
draw whatever they required. Ballantyne, 



30 TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 

especially, required so much, and required that 
much so often, that Murray was obliged to 
sever a connection too costly for his purse. 
Then his partial ownership of Blackwood's 
Magazine was for years a thorn- in his flesh, 
and there is something truly pathetic in his 
miserable attempts to modify the personalities 
of that utterly irrepressible journal. "In the 
name of God," he writes vehemently to Wil- 
liam Blackwood, "why do you seem to think 
it necessary that each number must give pain 
to some one } " Even the Quarterly, his own 
literary offspring, and the pride and glory of 
his heart, was at times but a fractious child, 
and cost him, after the fashion of children, 
many sleepless nights. Gifford, the editor, 
was incurably unbusinesslike in his habits, 
and never could understand why subscribers 
should complain and raise a row because the 
magazine chanced to be a month or six weeks 
late. It was sure to appear some time, and 
they had all the pleasure of anticipation. It 
was a point of honor with him, also, to con- 
ceal the names of his contributors, so that 



TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 3I 

when offence was given to anybody — which 
was pretty nearly always — the aggrieved per- 
son immediately attacked Murray in return. 
There are hosts of letters in these volumes 
from indignant authors who express them- 
selves with true British candor because the 
Quarterly has assailed their books, or their 
friends' books, or their friends' friends' books, 
or their pet politicians, or their most cherished 
political schemes. There are hosts of other 
letters which merely record a distinctly un- 
favorable opinion of the magazine's literary 
qualities, and which lament with pitiless 
sincerity that the last number hardly contained 
a single readable article. 

All these annoyances, however, prickly 
though they appear, are but trifles in compari- 
son with the extraordinary demands made 
upon Murray as a publisher. Impecunious 
playwrights, like poor Charles Maturin, pelt 
him with unsalable dramas and heartrending 
appeals for help. Impecunious essayists, like 
Charles Marsh, send papers to the Quarterly, 
and — before they are read — request fifteen 



32 TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 

pounds, *' as money on manuscript deposited." 
Impecunious patriots, like Foscolo — that 
bright particular star of sentimental Liberals 
— demand loans of a thousand pounds, to be 
repaid with literary work. Impecunious poets, 
like James Hogg, borrow fifty pounds with the 
lofty patronage of sovereigns. It is very amus- 
ing to note the tone assumed by the Ettrick 
Shepherd in his intercourse with a man of 
Murray's influence and position. When he is 
in a good humor, that is, when he has negotiat- 
ed a successful loan, he writes in this generous 
fashion : " Though I have heard some bitter 
things against you, I never met witli any man 
whatever who, on so slight an acquaintance, 
has behaved to me so much like a gentleman." 
Or again, " You may be misled, and )'ou may 
be mistaken, my dear ]\Iurra)% but as long as 
you tell me the simple truth as plainh', }'ou 
and I will be friends." If things go haltingly, 
however, and there is a dela}' in forwarding 
cheques, this magnificent condescension sharp- 
ens into angry protest. *' What the deuce," 
he writes vehemently, "have you made of my 



TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 33 

excellent poem,"" that you are never publish- 
ing it, while I am starving for money, and cannot 
even afford a Christmas goose to my friends ? " 
When a new edition of TJie Queen s Wake was 
printed in Edinburgh, a very handsome quarto 
selling for a guinea — which seems a heart- 
breaking price — Murray with his usual gener- 
osity subscribed for twenty-five copies; where- 
upon we find Hogg promptly acknowledging 
this munificence by begging him to persuade 
others to do likewise. '' You must make a 
long pull and a strong pull in London for sub- 
scriptions," he writes, with enviable composure, 
'* as you and Mr. Rogers are the principal 
men I have to rely on." There is something 
very tranquillizing in the gentle art of shift- 
ing one's burdens to other shoulders. Genius 
flourishes like the mountain oak when it can 
strike root in the money-boxes of less gifted 
friends. 

If tact and patience were both required in 
soothing Hogg's petulant vanity and in pro- 
viding for his extravagant habits, the task be- 
* " The Pilgrims of the Sun," 



34 TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 

came harder and more thankless when Leigh 
Hunt presented himself in the field. I can 
imagine few things more delightful than to 
have had money transactions with a person of 
Leigh Hunt's peculiar and highly original 
methods. He was a kind of literary Oliver, 
crying perpetually for more. When the 
Story of Rimini was still uncompleted, it was 
offered by the poet to Murray with this 
diverting assurance : 

** Booksellers tell me I ought not to ask less 
than four hundred and fifty pounds (which is a 
sum I happen to want just now), and my 
friends, not in the trade, say I ought not to 
ask less than five hundred, with such a trifling 
acknowledgment upon the various editions, 
after the second and third, as shall enable me 
to say that I am still profiting by it." 

Murray, evidently disconcerted by the cool- 
ness of this proposal, writes back with veiled 
and courteous sarcasm, suggesting that the 
manuscript be offered upon these terms to 
other publishers. Should they refuse to ac- 
cept it, he is willing to print a small edition at 



TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 35 

his own expense, and divide the profits with 
the author, to whom the copyright shall be re- 
stored. Rather to our amazement, and per- 
haps to Murray's, Leigh Hunt closes im- 
mediately with this very moderate offer; and 
as soon as the book appears he writes again, 
begging to have part of the money advanced 
to him. Murray's reply is eminently char- 
acteristic of the man. The poem, he says, is 
selling well. Should the entire edition be ex- 
hausted, which he doubts not will be the case, 
the poet's share of the profits would amount to 
exactly forty-eight pounds and ten shillings. 
He takes pleasure in enclosing a cheque for 
fifty pounds, and only asks that a receipt may 
be sent him for the same. The receipt is not 
sent until ten days are past, when it arrives 
accompanied by a long letter in which Leigh 
Hunt enlarges upon his pecuniary troubles — 
concerning these he is as explicit as Micawber 
— and proposes that Murray should now pur- 
chase the copyright oi Rimini for four hundred 
and fifty pounds, and let him have the money 
at once. Unhappily, the answer to this admi- 



36 TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 

rable piece of negotiation has been lost, but it 
was evidently too patronizing to please the 
poet, who was as sensitive as he was insatiable. 
The next letter we have from him sharply re- 
minds Murray that he is not seeking for as- 
sistance, but merely endeavoring to transact a 
piece of business which would involve no pos- 
sible risk for any one. Finally the poor har- 
assed publisher persuades him with soft words 
to sell the copyright of Riini/ii to another 
firm, and there must have been a deep breath 
of relief drawn in Albemarle Street when the 
matter was at last adjusted, and the trouble- 
some correspondence ceased. In fact, there 
is a letter from Blackwood frankly congratu- 
lating Murray on his escape. "I dare say you 
are well rid of Lei^^h Hunt," writes this ex- 
perienced ally to his fellow-sufferer; "and I 
really pity you when I think of the difficult)- 
you must often have in managing with authors, 
and particularly \\\i\\ the friends of authors 
whom you wish to oblige." 

One of those whom Murray wished eagerly 
to oblige, until he found the task too costly for 



TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 3/ 

his purse, was Madame de Stael. For the 
English and French editions of her work on 
Germany he paid no less than fifteen hundred 
pounds, and speedily found himself a loser by 
the transaction. Gifford, who had scant liking 
for the celebrated " hurricane in petticoats," 
writes to him on the occasion with gentle 
malice, and a too evident amusement at his 
discomfiture: "I can venture to assure you 
that the hope of keeping her from the press is 
quite vain. The family of CEdipus were not 
inore haunted and goaded by the Furies than 
the Neckers, father, mother, and daughter, 
have always been by the demon of publication. 
Madame de Stael will therefore write and print 
without intermission." Not without being well 
paid, however ; for three years later we find 
the Baron de Stael writing to Murray in his 
mother's laame, and demanding four thousand 
pounds for her three-volume work, Des Causes 
et des Effets de la Revolution Fi^angaise. *' My 
mother i?tsists upon four thousand pounds, 
besides a credit in books for every new edi- 
tion," says this imperative gentleman, some- 



38 TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 

what in the manner of a footpad ; to whom 
Murray responds with much tranquiUity, 
thanking him for his " obHging letter," and 
intimating that he and Longman together are 
willing to pay one thousand pounds for the 
first French and English editions, and three 
hundred and fifty pounds for the second. 
Madame de Stael indignantly repudiates this 
offer, declaring that twenty -five hundred 
pounds is the least she can think of taking, 
and that the book will be a bargain at such a 
price. Murray, who knows something about 
bargains, and who has been rendered more 
cautious than usual by his experience with 
LAllemagnc, declines such palpable risks, and 
excuses himself from further negotiations. La 
Revolution Francaise did not appear until after 
Madame de Stael's death, when it was pub- 
lished by Messrs. Baldwin and Cradock, and 
proved a lamentable failure, people having 
begun by that time to grow a trifle weary of 
such a thrice-told tale. 

The most amusing and at the same time most 
pathetic bit of correspondence in these two 



TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 39 

big volumes relates to a translation of Faust, 
which Coleridge, so eminently qualified for the 
task, offers to write for Murray. He unfolds 
his views in a letter as long as an average 
essay — or what we call an essay in these de- 
generate days — evincing on every page a su- 
perb contempt for the reading public, which 
was expected to buy the book, a painful re- 
luctance to "attempt anything of a literary 
nature with any motive of pecuniary advan- 
tage " — which does not prevent him from doing 
some elaborate bargaining later on — and a 
tendency to plunge into intellectual abstrac- 
tions, calculated to chill the heart of the stout- 
est publisher in Christendom. There is one 
incomparable paragraph which Coleridge alone 
could have written, and a portion of which — 
only a portion — I cannot refrain from quoting : 
" Any work in Poetry strikes me with more 
than common awe, as proposed for realization 
by myself, because from long habits of medita- 
tion on language, as the symbolic medium of 
the connection of Thought with Thought as 
affected and modified by Passion and Emotion, 



40 TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 

I should spend daj's in avoiding what I deemed 
faults, though with the full foreknowledge that 
their admission would not have offended three 
of all m}' readers, and might perhaps be deemed 
beauties by three hundred — if so many there 
were ; and this not out of any respect for the 
public {i.e., the persons who might happen to 
purchase and look over the book) but from a 
hobby-horsical, superstitious regard to my own 
feelings and sense of Duty. Language is the 
sacred Fire in this Temple of Humanity, and 
the Muses are its especial and vestal priestesses. 
Though I cannot prevent the vile drugs and 
counterfeit Frankincense which render its 
flames at once pitchy, glowing, and unsteady, 
I would yet be no voluntary accomplice in the 
Sacrilege. With the commencement of a Pub- 
lic, commences the degradation of the Good 
and the Beautiful — both fade and retire be- 
fore the accidentally Agreeable. Othello be- 
comes a hollow lip-worship ; and the Castle 
S/^eetre, or any more peccant thing of Froth, 
Noise, and Impermanence, that may have over- 
billowed it on the restless sea of curiosit}', is 



TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 4I 

the true Prayer of the Praise and Admira- 
tion." 

Fancy the feelings of a poor pubHsher as- 
sailed with this raging torrent of words ! Mur- 
ray, stemming the tide as best he can, replies 
in a short, businesslike note, proposing terms 
— not very liberal ones — for the desired trans- 
lation. Whereupon Coleridge writes a second 
letter, actually longer than the first, intimating 
that a hundred pounds is but scant remu- 
neration for such a piece of work, "executed 
as alone I can or dare do it — that is, to the 
utmost of my power ; for which the intolerable 
Pain, nay the far greater Toil and Effort of 
doings otherwise, is a far safer Pledge than any 
solicitude on my part concerning the approba- 
tion of the Public." 

Finally, the undertaking was abandoned, 
and the English-speaking world lost its single 
chance of having Faust adequately trans- 
lated ; lost it, I truly believe, through the re- 
luctance of even a patient man to stomach any 
further correspondence. 

Trials of a very different order poured in on 



42 TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 

Murray through his connection with Lord 
Byron, an honor which was not altogether 
without thorns. People who thought Bx'ron's 
poetry immoral wrote frankly to Murray to say 
so. People who did not think Byron's poetry 
immoral wrote quite as frankly to complain of 
those who did. His noble lordship himself 
was at times both petulant and exacting, and 
there is a ring of true dignity in the following 
remonstrance offered by the publisher to the 
peer, by " Mr. Bookseller Murray," as Napier 
contemptuously calls him, to the poet whose 
good qualities he was so quick to understand : 
"I assure you," he writes, "that I take no 
umbrage at irritability which will occasionally 
burst from a mind like yours ; but I sometimes 
feel a deep regret that in our pretty long inter- 
course I appear to have failed to show that a 
man in my situation may possess the feelings 
and principles of a gentleman. Most certainly 
do I think that, from personal attachment, I 
could venture as much in any shape for your 
service as any of those who have the good for- 
tune to be ranked amongst your friends." 



TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 43 

In fact, the friends of authors were too often, 
as Blackwood hinted, the sources of Murray's 
severest trials. Friends are obliging creatures 
in their way, and always ready to give with 
lavish hearts their wealth of criticism and opin- 
ion. There is a delightful letter from the Rev. 
H. H, Milman, Dean of St. Paul's, offering to 
Murray his sadly unreadable poem Belshaz- 
zar, with this timely intimation: "I give you 
fair warning that all the friends who have 
hitherto seen it assure me that I shall not do 
myself justice unless I demand a very high 
price for it." Murray, in reply, hints as ur- 
banely as he can that, as it is he and not Mr. 
Milman's friends who is to pay the price, he 
cannot accept their judgment in the matter as 
final ; he is compelled to take into considera- 
tion his own chances of profit. Throughout 
all his correspondence we note this tone of 
careful self-repression, of patient and courte- 
ous kindness. Now and then only, particularly 
trying letters appear to have been left unan- 
swered, as though the limits of even his endur- 
ance had been reached. When we remember 



44 TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 

that the Quarterly was the cherished idol of 
his life, and that his pride and delight in it 
knew no bounds, we can dimly appreciate his 
feelings on receiving the following lines from 
Southey, w^iose principal income for years had 
been derived from the magazine's most liberal 
and open-handed payments. "It is a great 
price," writes the author of Thalaba, who has 
just pocketed a comfortable sum, " and it is 
very convenient for me to receive it. But I 
will tell you, with that frankness which }'Ou 
have alwa}'s found in m}' correspondence and 
conversation, that I must suspect my time 
might be more profitably employed (as I am 
sure it might be more worthily) than in writing 
for }'our journal, even at that price." 

I am not wont to peer too closely into the 
secrets of the human heart, but I would like to 
know exactly how Murray felt when he read 
that letter. " Let me at least be eaten by a 
lion ! " says Epictetus. " Let me at least be 
insulted by a genius ! " might well have been 
the publisher's lament. 



THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 

'' I ^HAT innocent nondescript, the average 
"'- reader, is suffering very sorely at the 
present day from what might be justly called 
the oppression or tyranny of notes. I hear, 
indeed, from time to time, bitter complaints of 
editorial inaccuracy, of the unscholarly treat- 
ment of quite forgotten masterpieces by the 
industrious gentlemen who seek to reintroduce 
them to the public; but such inaccuracy can 
wound only the limited number who know 
more than the editor, and who in their secret 
souls are not sorry to prove him wrong. The 
average reader, even though he hold himself 
to be of moderate intelligence, is happily ig- 
norant of such fine shadings, and only asks 
that he may enjoy his books in a moderately 
intelligent manner; that he may be helped 
over hedges and ditches, and allowed to ram- 
ble unmolested where the ground seems toler- 

.45 



4.6 THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 

ably smooth. This is precisely the privilege, 
however, which a too liberal editor is disin- 
clined to allow. He will build you a bridge 
over a raindrop, put ladders up a pebble, and 
encompass you on every side with ingenious 
alpenstocks and climbing-irons; yet when, 
perchance, you stumble and hold out a hand 
for help, behold, he is never there to grasp it. 
He merely refers you, with some coldness, to 
a remote authority who will give you the assist- 
ance you require when you have reached the 
end of your journey. Mr. Ritchie, for exam- 
ple, who has recently edited a volume of Mrs. 
Carlyle's early letters, expects you patiently 
to search for the information you want in Mr. 
Froude's pages, which is always a disheartening 
thing to be asked to do. Yet when Jeanie 
Welsh, writing cheerfully of an inconstant 
lover, says, ^^ Mais iiiviportc ! It is only one 
more Spanish castle demolished; another may 
start up like a mushroom in its place ; " an ex- 
planatory note carefully reveals to you that 
"Spanish castle" really means "chateau en 
Espagne" — a circumstance which even Mac- 



THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 47 

aulay's schoolboy would probably have deci- 
phered for himself. 

If it be hard on the average reader to be re- 
ferred chillingly to modern writers who are at 
least within approachable distance, it is harder 
still to be requested to look up classical au- 
thorities. If it be hard to be told occasionally 
by that prince of good editors, Mr. Alfred 
Ainger, to please turn elsewhere for the little 
bits of information which we think he might 
give us about Charles Lamb, it is harder still 
to have Mr. Wright refuse to translate for us 
Edward Fitzgerald's infrequent lapses into 
Greek. What is the use of saying in a note 
"v. 9" when Fitzgerald quotes Herodotus.^ If 
I can read the quotation for myself, I have no 
need to hunt up v. 9; and if I can't, v. 9 is of 
no use to me when found. Even " Hor. Od. I. 
4, 14, 15," is not altogether satisfactory to the 
indifferent scholar, for whom Fitzgerald him- 
self had such generous sympathy, and for 
whom his translations were avowedly under- 
taken. 

These are merely cases, however, in which 



48 THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 

notes refuse to be helpful; they are apt to be- 
come absolutely oppressive when accompany- 
ing older writers. A few years ago I bought 
a little English edition of the Rcligio Medici, 
to which are added the Letter to a Friend and 
Christian Morals. The book is one of Mac- 
millan's Golden Treasury Series, and is edited 
by Mr. W. A. Greenhill, who opens with an 
" Editor's Preface," eighteen pages long, and 
fairly bristling with kno^^•lcdge points. After 
this come a "Chronological Table of Dates, Con- 
nected with Sir Thomas Browne," two pages 
long; "Note on the Discovery of the Remains 
of Sir Thomas Browne in 1840," two pages; 
" Brief Notices of Former Editors of the Religio 
Medici,'' four pages ; ' ' List of Editions oi Religio 
J/^<^/<:/," thirteen pages; "Collations of Some 
Old Editions of Religio Medici^' three pages; 
" List of Editions of Letter to a Friend and 
CJiristian Morals,'' five pages; ''Addenda et 
Corrigenda^' owd page. Having thus laborious- 
ly cleared the way,wc are at last gladdened by a 
sight of the Religio Medici itself, which, together 
with the Letter 7i\\<\ C/iristian ]\L>rals, occupies 



THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 49 

two hundred and thirty pages. Then, following 
close, like the mighty luggage of a Persian army, 
come an array of Notes Critical and Explana- 
tory," eighty-eight pages; and an Index just 
sixty-nine pages long. Thus it will be seen that 
two hundred and five pages of editorial work 
are deemed necessary to elucidate two hundred 
and thirty pages of Sir Thomas Browne, which 
seems like an intolerable deal of sack for such 
a quantity of bread. To compress all this into 
a small volume requires close printing and 
flimsy paper, and the ungrateful reader thinks 
in his hardened heart that he would rather a 
little more space had been given to the author, 
and a little less to the editor, who is for most 
of us, after all, a secondary consideration. It 
is also manifestly impossible, with such a num- 
ber of notes, even to refer to them at the bot- 
tom of the page; yet without this guiding finger 
they are often practically useless. We are not 
as a rule aware, when we read, what informa- 
tion we lack, and it becomes a grievous duty 
to examine every few minutes and see if we 
ought not to be finding something out. 



50 THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 

A glance at the notes themselves is very 
discouraging: 

"P. lo, 1. 14, directed, A to E, G; direct, F, 
H to L. 

"P. 10, 1. 16, rectified, A to I ; rectifie, J, 
K, L. 

" P. 10, 1. 28, consist, A to J; resist, K, L." 

Reading with such helps as these becomes a 
literary nightmare: 

**P. 8, 1, 8, distinguished] Chapman (r) and 
Gardiner (w) read ' being distinguished.' 

'*P. 8, 1. 8, distinguished not only] Wilkin 
(t) read 'not only distinguished.'" 

And this is weirder still : 

"P. 59, 1. 4, antimetathesis, c to M; antana- 
clasis, A, B; transposition of words, N, o." 

It may easily be surmised that eighty-eight 
pages of such concentrated and deadly erudi- 
tion weigh very heavily on the unscholarly 
soul. We are reminded forcibly of the impa- 
tience manifested by Mr. E. S. DaUas, in TJic 
Cay Science, over Porson's notes on Euripides, 
from which he had hoped so much and gleaned 
so little; which were all about words and less 



THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 5 1 

than words — syllables, letters, accents, punc- 
tuation. 

"Codex A and Codex B, Codex Cantabrigi- 
ensis and Codex Cottonianus, were ransacked 
in turn to show how this noun should be in the 
dative, not in the accusative; how that verb 
should have the accent paroxytone, not peris- 
pomenon; and how, by all the rules of pros- 
ody, there should be an iambus, not a spon- 
dee, in this place or that." The lad who has 
heard all his college life about the wonderful 
supplement to the Hecuba turns to it with 
wistful eyes, expecting to find some subtle key 
to Greek tragedy. "Behold, it is a treatise on 
certain Greek metres. Its talk is of caesural 
pauses, penthemimeral and hephthemimeral, 
of isochronous feet, of enclitics and cretic ter- 
minations; and the grand doctrine it promul- 
gates is expressed in the canon regarding the 
pause which, from the discoverer, has been 
named the Porsonian — that when the iambic 
trimeter after a word of more than one syllable 
has the cretic termination included either in 
one word or in two, then the fifth foot must be 



52 THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 

an iambus. The young student throws down 
the book thus prefaced and supplemented, and 
wonders if this be all that giants of Porsonian 
height can see or care to speak about in Greek 
literature." 

But then be it remembered that Euripides, as 
edited by Porson, was intended for the use of 
scholars, and there exists an impression — per- 
haps erroneous — that this is the sort of food for 
which scholars hunger and thirst. Sir Thomas 
Browne has, happily, not yet passed out of the 
hands of the general reader, whose appetite for 
intellectual abstraction and the rigors of precis- 
ion is distinctly moderate, and in whose behalf 
I urge my plea to-day. 

After the oppressively erudite notes come 
those which interpret trifles with painstaking 
fidelity, and which reveal to us the meaning of 
quite familiar words. In Ferrier's admirable 
edition of the Nocfc's Ambrosiaiuc, for example, 
we are told witli naVvc gravity that " wiselike " 
means "judicious," that "glowering" means 
" staring," that " parritch " is *' porridge," that 
" guffaw " is a " loud laugh," that " douce" is 



THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 53 

" sedate," that " gane " is " gone," and that '' in 
a jiffy" means *' immediately." But surely the 
readers of Christopher North do not require 
information like this. *' Douce " and ''par- 
ritch" and " guffaw " are not difficult words to 
understand, and " in a jiffy" would seem to 
come within the intellectual grasp of many who 
have not yet made the acquaintance of the al- 
phabet. 

It may be, however, that there are people 
who really like to be instructed in this manner, 
just as there are people who like to go to lec- 
tures and to organ recitals. It may even be 
that a taste for notes, like a taste for gin, or opi- 
um, or Dr. Ibsen's dramas, increases with what 
it feeds on. In that tiny volume of Selected 
Poems by Gray which Mr. Gosse has edited for 
the Clarendon Press, there are forty-two pages 
of notes to sixty pages of poetry; and while 
some of them are valuable and interesting, 
many more seem strangely superfluous. But 
Mr. Gosse, who has his finger on the literary 
pulse of his generation, is probably the last 
man in England to furnish information unless 



54 THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 

it is desired. He knows, better than most pur- 
veyors of knowledge, what it is that readers 
want; he is not prone to waste his precious 
minutes; he has a saving sense of humor; and 
he does not aspire to be a lettered philanthro- 
pist fretting to enlighten mankind. If, then, he 
finds it necessary to elucidate that happy trifle. 
On the Death of a Favorite Cat^ with no less 
than seven notes, which is at the rate of one 
for every verse, it must be that he is filling an 
expressed demand; it must be that he is aware 
that modern students of Gray — every one who 
reads a poet is a " student" nowadays — like to 
be told by an editor about Tyrian purple, and 
about Arion's dolphin, and about the difference 
between a tortoise-shell and a tabby. As for 
the seven pages of notes that accompany the 
Elegy, they carry me back in spirit to the friend 
of my childhood, Miss Edgeworth's Rosamond, 
who was expected to understand every word of 
every poem she studied. What a blessing Mr. 
Gosse's notes would have been to that poor, 
dear, misguided little girl, who rashly com- 
mitted the Elegy to memory because, in hon- 



THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 55 

est, childish fashion, she loved its pretty sound ! 
Who can forget the pathetic scene where she 
attempts to recite it, and has only finished the 
first line, 

" The curfew tolls the knell of parting day," 

when Godfrey, whom I always thought, and 
still think, a very disagreeable boy, interrupts 
her ruthlessly. 

" * What is meant by the " curfew " ? What 
is meant by '^tolls''? What is a ''knell"? 
What is meant by *' parting day " ? ' 

** 'Godfrey, I cannot tell the meaning of ev- 
ery word, but I know the general meaning. It 
means that the day is going, that it is evening, 
that it is growing dark. Now let me go on.' 

*' ' Go on,' said Godfrey, ' and let us see what 
you will do when you come to ''the boast of 
heraldry," to " the long-drawn aisle and fretted 
vault," to the "village Hampden," to "some 
mute inglorious Milton," and to "some Crom- 
well guiltless of his country's blood," you who 
have not come to Cromwell yet, in the history 
of England.' " 



56 THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 

No wonder poor Rosamond is disheartened 
and silenced by such an array of difficulties in 
her path. It is comforting to know that God- 
frey himself comes to grief, a little later, with 
The Bard^ and that even the wise and irre- 
proachable Laura confesses to have been baf- 
fled by the lines, 

" If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song 
May hope, chaste eve, to soothe thy modest ear." 

" Oaten stop" was a mystery, and "eve" she 
thought — and was none the worse for thinking 
it — meant our first great erring mother. 

No such wholesome blunders — pleasant to re- 
call in later, weary, well-instructed days — would 
be possible for Miss Edgeworth's little people 
if they lived in our age of pitiless enlighten- 
ment, when even a book framed for their es- 
pecial joy, like TJic CJiildrois Trcasjiry of 
EnglisJi So}ig, bristles with marginal notes. 
Here Rosamond would have found an expla- 
nation of no less than forty-eight words in the 
Elegy, and would probably have understood it 
a great deal better, and loved it a great deal 



THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 5/ 

less. It is healthy and natural for a child to be 
forcibly attracted by what she does not wholly 
comprehend; the music of words appeals very 
sweetly to childish ears, and their meaning 
comes later — comes often after the first keen 
unconscious pleasure is past. I once knew a 
tiny boy who so delighted in Byron's des(:rip- 
tion of the dying gladiator that he made me 
read it to him over, and over, and over again. 
He did not know — and I never told him — what 
a gladiator was. He did not know that it was 
a statue, and not a real man, described. He 
had not the faintest notion of what was meant 
by the Danube, or the " Dacian mother," or *' a 
Roman holiday." Historically and geograph- 
ically, the boy's mind was a happy blank. 
There was nothing intelligent or sagacious in 
his enjoyment; only a blissful stirring of the 
heartstrings by reason of strong words, and 
swinging verse, and his own tangle of groping 
thoughts. But what child who reads Cowper's 
pretty remonstrance to his spaniel, and the 
spaniel's neat reply, wants to be told in a suc- 
cession of dismal notes that " allures" means 



58 THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 

" tempts," that "remedy " means ** cure," that 
"killing time" means " wasting time," that "des- 
tined " means " meant for," and that " behest " 
means " command" ? Cowpcr is one of the sim- 
plest of writers, and the little boys and girls 
who cannot be trusted unarmed in his com- 
pany had better confine their reading to Rob- 
inson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable, or to 
the veracious pages of Mother Goose. But 
perhaps the day is not far distant when even 
Mother Goose will afford food for instruction 
and a fresh industry for authors, and when the 
hapless children of the dawning century will 
be confronted with a dozen highly abbreviated 
and unintelligible notes referring them to some 
Icelandic Saga or remote Indian epic for the 
bloody history of the Three Blind Mice. 



CONVERSATION IN NOVELS 

A GREAT many years ago, when I was a 
^^^ little girl, I used to know a dear, placid, 
sunny-tempered old lady who was stone-deaf 
and an insatiable novel-reader. She always 
came to our house bearing a black bag which 
held her jointed ear-trumpet, and she always 
left it with a borrowed novel under her arm. 
As she had reached that comfortable period of 
life when a book is as easily forgotten as read, 
our slender library supplied all her demands, 
on the same principle of timely reappearance 
which makes an imposing stage army out of 
two dozen elusive supernumeraries. She had 
a theory of selection all her own, and to which 
she implicitly trusted. She glanced over a 
story very rapidly, and if it had too many solid, 
page-long paragraphs — reflections, descrip- 
tions, etc. — she put it sadly but steadfastly 

aside. If, on the contrary, it was well broken 

59 



6o CONVERSATION IN NOVELS 

up into conversations, which always impart an 
air of sprightliness to a book, she said she was 
sure she would like it, and carried it off in tri- 
umph. 

Those were not days, be it remembered, 
when people wrote fiction for the sake of in- 
troducing discussions. There still lingered in 
the novelist's mind the time-worn heresy that 
he had a story to tell, and that his people must 
act as well as talk. The plot — delightful and 
obsolete word ! — was then in good repute, and 
conversation was mainly useful in helping on 
the tale, in providing copious love scenes, and, 
with really good novelists, in illustrating and 
developing character. Thomas Love Peacock's 
inimitable dialogues had indeed been long 
given to the world; but quiet people of restrict- 
ed cultivation knew nothing of them, and would 
have found it difficult to realize their loss. I 
can hardly fancy our dear old friend reading 
and enjoying the delicious war of words in 
CrotcJict Castle, and I should be grieved to 
tliink of her suddenly confronted with those 
scraps of sententious wisdom, in which its au- 



CONVERSATION IN NOVELS 6l 

thor took a truly impish and reprehensible de- 
light. Such a sentiment as '' Men have been 
found very easily permutable into ites and 
onians, avians and arians," might have sorely 
puzzled her benign and tranquil soul. 

Yet no one can accuse Peacock of writing 
his novels in order to express his own personal 
convictions. The fact is that, after reading 
them, we are often very much in the dark as 
to what his convictions were. We know he 
loved old things better than new ones, and 
wine better than water; and that is about as 
far as we can follow him with security. '^ The 
intimate friends of Mr. Peacock may have un- 
derstood his political sentiments," says Lord 
Houghton disconsolately, ''but it is extremely 
difficult to discover them from his work." His 
people simply talk in character, sometimes 
tiresomely, sometimes with unapproachable 
keenness and humor, and the scope of his sto- 
ries hardly permits any near approach to the 
fine gradations, the endless variety, of life. 
Mr. Chainmail never opens his lips save in 
praise of feudalism. Mr. Mac Quedy discusses 



62 CONVERSATION IN NOVELS 

political economy only. Even the witty Dr. 
Folliott, " a fellow of infinite jest," seldom gets 
beyond the dual delights of Greek and dining. 
It is all vastly piquant and entertaining, but it 
is leagues away from the casual conversation, 
the little leisurely, veracious gossip in which 
Jane Austen reveals to us with merciless dis- 
tinctness the secret springs that move a human 
heart. She has scant need to describe her 
characters, and she seldom takes that trouble. 
They betray themselves at every word, and 
stand convicted on their own evidence. We 
are not warned in advance against Isabella 
Thorpe. We meet her precisely as Catherine 
meets her in the Pump-room at Bath, where 
the young lady speedily opens her lips, and 
acquaints us in the most vivacious manner with 
her own callous folly and selfishness. Every 
syllable uttered by Mrs. Norris is a new and 
luminous revelation ; we know her just that 
much better than we did before she spoke. 
Even Sense and Sensii'ilify, by no means the 
best of Miss Austen's novels, starts with that 
admirable discussion between Mr. John Dash- 



CONVERSATION IN NOVELS 63 

wood and his wife on the subject of his mother's 
and sisters' maintenance. It is a short chapter, 
the second in the book, and at its close we are 
masters of the whole situation. We have 
sounded the feeble egotism of Mr. Dashwood, 
and the adroit meanness of his spouse. We know 
precisely what degree of assistance Elinor and 
Marianne are likely to receive from them. We 
foresee the relation these characters will bear 
to each other during the progress of the story, 
and we have been shown with delicious humor 
how easy and pleasant is the task of self- 
deception. That a girl of nineteen should have 
been capable of such keenly artistic work is 
simply one of the miracles of literature; and 
the more we think about it, the more mirac- 
ulous it grows. The best we can do is to bow 
our heads, and pay unqualified homage at its 
shrine. 

Some portion of Jane Austen's ability for 
portraying character in conversation is discern- 
ible in at least one of her too numerous succes- 
sors in the craft. The authoress of Mademoi- 
selle Ixe and of Cecilia de Noel has already 



64 CONVERSATION IN NOVELS 

proven to the world how deft and skilful is 
her manipulation of that difficult medium, 
drawing-room gossip. It would be unjust and 
absurd to compare her stories, slight and un- 
substantial as pencil sketches, with the finished 
masterpieces of English fiction; but there are 
touches in these modern tales which con\ince 
even a casual reader of splendid possibilities 
ahead. The setting o{ Mademoiselle Ixe is so 
fine, the lightly drawn English people who sur- 
round the mysterious governess and her still 
more mysterious victim are so real, that we 
cease to ask ourselves obtrusive questions con- 
cerning the purpose and utility of the crime. 
Better still are some of the scenes in Cecilia de 
Noel, where Lady Atherley's serene and imper- 
turbable good sense tempers the atmosphere, 
and gives exactly the proper effect to her hus- 
band's rather long-winded eloquence, to Mrs. 
Mostyn's amiable and cruel evangelism, and 
to Mrs. Molyneux's amusing eccentricities. All 
these characters have intli\iduality of their 
own, and all reveal themselves through the in- 
tricacies of conversation, while occasionally 



CONVERSATION IN NOVELS 6$ 

there is a felicitous touch worthy of Jane Aus»- 
ten's hand ; as when Lady Atherley listens 
tranquilly to Mrs. Mostyn's tirade against the 
ritualistic curate, and evolves from it the one 
judicious conclusion that he is evidently an 
Austyn of Temple Leigh, and that it would be 
desirable to ask him to dinner. 

The real drawback to Lanoe Falconer's art 
is, not the brevity of her work, but the fact that 
her people cannot develop on purely natural 
lines, because they are hampered by the ter- 
rible necessity of illustrating a moral; and 
even in their most unguarded moments the 
task assigned them is never wholly laid aside. 
It is seldom that a good tract is a good story 
too, and all the novelist's skill is powerless to 
impart a vivid semblance of truth to characters 
who have to " talk up" to a given subject, and 
teach a given lesson. The inartistic treatment 
of material results, curiously enough, in weak- 
ening our sense of reality; yet if the authoress 
of Cecilia de Noel would consent, for a few 
short years, to abandon social and spiritual 
problems, to concern herself as little with Ni- 



66 CONVERSATION IN NOVELS 

hilism as with eternal punishment, but to be 
content, as Jane Austen was content, with tell- 
ing a story, perhaps that story might be no 
unworthy successor of those matchless tales 
which are our refuge and solace in these dark 
days of ethical and unorthodox fiction. 

There is a great deal of charming conversa- 
tion, which is not as well known as it should 
be, in the best novels of Anthony Trollope. 
He gives his characters plenty of time and op- 
portunity to talk, without forcing them into 
arbitrary channels; and occasionally, as with 
Mrs. Proudie and Archdeacon Grantly, and 
Lady Glencora, he persuades them to let us 
know exactly what kind of people they are. 
Above all, there is such an air of veracity about 
his causeries that the most skeptical reader 
listens to them without a shadow of doubt. 
Who can ever forget Bertie Stanhope intimat- 
ing to Bishop Proudie that he had once thought 
of being a prelate himself, or Lady Glencora's 
midnight confidences to Alice, or that crucial 
contest between Dr. Tempest and Mrs. Proudie ! 
What pleasant wrangling goes on in Mrs. 



CONVERSATION IN NOVELS 6/ 

Dobbs Broughton's room over the memorable 
picture of Jael, when Dalrymple desires his 
model to lean forward, throwing her weight 
on the nail, and Miss Van Siever not unnatu- 
rally suggests that such an action would prob- 
ably have awakened Sisera before the murder 
was done ! It all seems idle enough — this care- 
less, lively talk — but is by no means purpose- 
less. Life is built up of such moments, and if 
we are to live with the people in books, it must 
be through little confidences on their parts and 
sympathy on ours; it must be through uncon- 
scious confidences on their parts and unre- 
stricted sympathy on ours. 

Now, if a novelist permits his characters to 
talk at us, the charm of unconsciousness is gone. 
If we feel for a moment they are uttering his 
sentiments for our approval or conversion, we 
cease to sympathize because we cease to be- 
lieve. There is a clever and suspiciously op- 
portune conversation in David Grieve between 
that sorely tried hero and an intelligent work- 
ingwoman in the Champs Elysees upon the 
relative merits of TUnion Legale and I'Union 



68 CONVERSATION IN NOVELS 

Libre. It is, of course, a highly dispassionate 
discussion, intended as an appeal to reason 
and not to conscience; therefore the old-fash- 
ioned arguments of right and wrong, God and 
the Church, are carefully omitted. It fits in 
neatly with Davad's experiences, and places 
the whole matter in a singularly lucid light 
before the reader's eyes. Its one serious draw- 
back is that w^e can never persuade ourselves 
to believe that it ever took place. The French- 
woman is brought so suddenly up to the mark; 
she says so plainly that which Mrs. Humphry 
Ward thinks she ought to say; she is so charm- 
ingly unprejudiced and convincing, that we 
lose all faith in her before she has spoken a 
dozen words. The correctness of her views 
counts for nothing. *' When we leave out what 
we don't like, we can demonstrate most things," 
says the late Rector of Lincoln; and it is at 
least doubtful whether men and women ever 
live virtuous lives on the strength of an argu- 
ment. I>ady VxixtvAvn, o{ Mansfield Park, re- 
marking placidly from her sofa, " Do not act 
anything improper, my dears; Sir Thomas 



CONVERSATION IN NOVELS 69 

would not like it," may not exert a powerful 
influence for good; but who has any shadow 
of doubt that those are her very words ? They 
are spoken — as they should be — to her daugh- 
ters, and not to us. They are spoken — as they 
should be — by Lady Bertram, and not by Jane 
Austen. Therefore we listen with content, and 
take comfort in the thought that, whatever 
severities may be inflicted on us by the novel- 
ists of the future, it is not in the power of prog- 
ress to deprive us of the past. 



A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 

A MID the universal grayness that has set- 
-^^^ tied mistily down upon English fiction, 
amid the delicate drab-colored shadings and 
half-lights which require, we are told, so fine a 
skill in handling, the old - fashioned reader 
misses, now and then, the vivid coloring of his 
youth. He misses the slow unfolding of quite 
impossible plots, the thrilling incidents that 
were wont pleasantly to arouse his apprehen- 
sion, and, most of all, two characters once 
deemed essential to every novel — the hero and 
the villain. The heroine is left us still, and her 
functions are far more complicated than in the 
simple days of yore, when little was required of 
her save to be beautiful as the stars. She faces 
now the most intricate problems of life; and 
she faces them witli conscious self-importance, 
a dismal power of analysis, and a robust can- 
dor in discussing their equivocal aspects that 

70 



A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS /I 

would have sent her buried sister blushing to 
the wall. There was sometimes a lamentable 
lack of solid virtue in this fair dead sister, a 
pitiful human weakness that led to her undo- 
ing; but she never talked so glibly about sin. 
As for the hero, he owes his banishment to the 
riotous manner in which his masters handled 
him. Bulwer strained our endurance and our 
credulity to the utmost; Disraeli took a step 
further, and Lothair, the last of his race, per- 
ished amid the cruel laughter of mankind. 

But the villain ! Remember what we owe to 
him in the past. Think how dear he has be- 
come to every rightly constituted mind. And 
now we are told, soberly and coldly, by the 
thin-blooded novelists of the dav, that his ab- 
sence is one of the crowning triumphs of mod- 
ern genius, that we have all grown too discrim- 
inating to tolerate in fiction a character who 
we feel does not exist in life. Man, we are re- 
minded, is complex, subtle, unfathomable, 
made up of good and evil so dexterously inter- 
mingled that no one element predominates 
coarsely over the rest. He is to be studied 



72 A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 

warily and with misgivings, not classified with 
brutal ease into the virtuous and bad. It is 
useless to explain to these analysts that the 
pleasure we take in meeting a character in a 
book does not always depend on our having 
known him in the family circle, or encountered 
him in our morning paper ; though, judged 
even by this stringent law, the villain holds his 
own. Accept Balzac's rule, and exclude from 
fiction not only all which might not really 
happen, but all which has not really happen- 
ed in truth, and we would still have studies 
enough in total depravity to darken all the 
novels in Christendom. 

What murder of romance was ever so wanton, 
so tragic, and so sombre as that which gave to 
the Edinburgh highway the name of Gabriel's 
Road ? There, in the sweet summer afternoon, 
fresh with the breath of primroses and cow- 
slips, the young tutor cut the throats of his two 
little pupils, in a mad, inexplicable revenge 
for their childish tale-bearing. Taken red- 
handed in the deed, he met with swift retribu- 
tion from the furious populace; and the same 



A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 73 

hour which witnessed the crime saw his pin- 
ioned corpse dangling from the nearest tree, 
with the bloody knife hung in awful mockery 
around its neck. Thus the murder and its 
punishment conspired to make the lonely road 
a haunted path, ghost-ridden, terrible; where 
women shivered and hurried on, and little 
boys, creepy with fear, scampered by, breath- 
less, in the dusk; seeing before them always, 
on the ragged turf, two small, piteous, blood- 
smeared bodies, and hearing ever, overhead, 
the rattle of the rusty knife against the felon's 
bones. The highway, with its unholy associa- 
tions discreetly perpetuated in its name, became 
an education to the good people of Edinburgh, 
and taught them the value of emotions. They 
must have indistinctly felt what Mr. Louis Ste- 
venson has so well described, the subtle har- 
mony that unites an evil deed to its location. 
" Some places," he says, '' speak distinctly. 
Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; 
certain old houses demand to be haunted; cer- 
tain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other 
spots, again, seem to abide their destiny, sug- 



74 A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 

gestive and impenetrable." And is all this fine 
and delicate sentiment, all this skillful playing 
with horror and fear, to be lost to fiction, mere- 
ly because, as De Quincey reluctantly admits, 
" the majority of murderers are incorrect char- 
acters " ? May we not forgive their general 
incorrectness for the sake of their literary and 
artistic value ? Shall Charles Lamb's testimony 
count for nothing, when we remember his com- 
fortable allusion to " kind, light-hearted Wain- 
wright " ? And what shall we think of Edward 
Fitzgerald, the gentlest and least hurtful of 
Englishmen, abandoning himself, in the clear 
and genial weather, to the delights of Tacitus, 
** full of pleasant atrocity " ? 

Repentant villains, I must confess, are not 
greatly to my mind. They sacrifice their ar- 
tistic to their ethical value, and must be handled 
with consummate skill to escape a suspicious 
flavor of Sunday-school romance. The hard- 
ened criminal, disarmed and converted by the 
innocent attractions of childhood, is a favorite 
device of poets and story-writers who cater to 
the sentiments of maternity; but it is wiser to 



A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 75 

lay no stress upon the permanency of such 
conversions. That swift and sudden yielding 
to a gentle emotion or a noble aspiration, 
which is one of the undying traits of humanity, 
attracts us often by the very force of its eva- 
nescence, by the limitations which prove its 
truth. But the slow, stern process of regen- 
eration is not an emotional matter, and cannot 
be convincingly portrayed with a few facile 
touches in the last chapter of a novel. Thack- 
eray knew better than this, when he showed us 
Becky Sharp touched and softened by her good 
little sister-in-law; heartsick now and then of 
her own troublesome schemes, yet sinking in- 
evitably lower and lower through the weight 
of overmastering instincts and desires. She 
can aspire intermittingly to a cleaner life, but 
she can never hope to reach it. The simple lit- 
erature of the past is curiously rich in these pa- 
thetic transient glimpses into fallen nature's 
brighter side. Where can we see depicted with 
more tenderness and truth the fitful relenting 
of man's brutality, after it has wrought the ruin 
it devised, than in the fine old ballad of Edom 



j6 A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 

C Gordon ? The young daughter of the house 
of Rodes is lowered from the walls of the burn- 
ing castle, and the cruel Gordon spears trans- 
fix her as she falls. She lies dead, in her 
budding girlhood, at the feet of her father's foe, 
and his heart is strangely stirred and troubled 
when he looks at her childish face. 

" O bonnie, bonnie was hir mouth, 
And cherry were hir cheiks, 
And clear, clear was hir yellow hair, 
Whereon the reid bluid dreips. 

" Then wi' his spear he turned hir owre, 

gin hir face was wan ! 

He sayd, ' You are the first that eir 

1 wisht alive again.' 

" He turned hir owre and owre again, 

O gin hir skin was whyte ! 
' I might hae spared that bonnie face 

To hae been sum man's delyte.' 

It is pleasant to know that the ruthless butcher 
was promptly pursued and slain for his crime, 
but it is finer still to realize that brief moment 
of bitterness and shame. I have sometimes 
thought that Rossetti's Sister Helen would 
have gained in artistic beauty if, after those 



A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS // 

three days of awful watching were over, af- 
ter the glowing fragment of wax had melted 
in the flames, and her lover's soul had passed 
her, sighing on the wind, there had come to 
the stricken girl a pang of supreme regret, an 
impulse of mad desire to undo the horror she 
had wrought. The conscience of a sinner, to 
use a striking phrase of Mr. Brownell's, ^' is 
doubtless readjusted rather than repudiated 
altogether," and there is an absolute truthful- 
ness in these sudden relapses into grace. 

For this reason, doubtless, I find Mr. Black- 
more's villains, with all their fascination and 
power, a shade too heavily, or at least too 
monotonously darkened. Parson Chowne is a 
veritable devil, and it is only his occasional 
humor — manifested grimly in deeds, not words 
— which enables us to bear the weight of his 
insupportable wickedness. The introduction 
of the naked savages as an outrage to village 
propriety; the summons to church, when he 
has a mind to fire the ricks of his parishioners, 
— these are the life-giving touches which mel- 
low down this overwrought figure, this black 



78 A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 

and scowling thunderbolt of humanity. Per- 
haps, also, JNIr. Blackmore, in his laudable de- 
sire for picturesqueness, la}'s too much stress 
on the malignant aspect, the appropriate phys- 
ical condition of his sinners. From Parson 
Chowne's "wondrous unfathomable face," 
which chills every heart with terror, to the 
" red glare " in Donovan Bulrag's eyes, there 
is ahvays something exceptional about these 
worthies, to indicate to all beholders what 
manner of men they are. One is reminded 
of Charles II. protesting, not unnaturally, 
against the perpetual swarthiness of stage vil- 
lains. *' We never see a rogue in a play but 
we clap on him a black periwig," complained 
the dark-skinned monarch, with a sense of 
personal griev^ance in this forced association 
between complexion and crime. It was the 
same subtle inspiration which prompted Kean 
to play Shylock in a red wig that suggested 
to Wilkie Collins Count Fosco's admirable 
size. The passion for embroidered waistcoats 
and fruit tarts, the petted white mice, the sym- 
pathetic gift of pastry to the organ-grinder's 



A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 79 

monkey, all the little touches which go to 
build up this colossal, tender-hearted, remorse- 
less, irresistible scoundrel are of interest and 
value to the portrait, but his fat is as essential 
as his knavery. It is one of those master 
strokes of genius which breaks away from all 
accepted traditions to build up a new type, 
perfect and unapproachable. We can no 
more imagine a thin Fosco than a melancholy 
Dick Swiveller, or a light-hearted Ravens- 
wood. 

Mr. Andrew Lang, who enjoys upon all oc- 
casions the courage of his convictions, has, in 
one of those pleasant papers, ''At the Sign of 
the Ship," given utterance to a sentiment so 
shockingly at variance with the prevalent the- 
ory of fiction, that the reader is divided be- 
tween admiration for his boldness and a vague 
surprise that a man should speak such words 
and live. There is a cheerfulness, too, about 
Mr. Lang's heterodoxy, a smiling ignorance of 
his own transgression, that warms our hearts 
and weakens our upbraiding. " The old sim- 
ple scheme," he says, " in which you had a real 



80 A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 

unmitigated villain, a heroine as pure as snow 
or flame, and a crowd of good ordinary people, 
gave us more agreeable reading, and reading 
not, I think, more remote from truth, than is to 
be found in Dr. Ibsen's Ghosts or in his Pillars 
of Society^ Now to support such a statement 
would be unscrupulous; to condemn it, dispirit- 
ing; but I wonder if the "real unmitigated vil- 
lain " is quite so simple a product as Mr. Lang 
appears to imagine. May not his absence from 
literature be owing as much to the limitations 
as to the disregard of modern realists } Is he, 
in truth, so easily drawn as to be unworthy of 
their subtle and discriminating pens } Is Sir 
Giles Overreach a mere child's toy in compar- 
ison with Consul Bernick, and is Brian de Bois- 
Guilbert unworthy to rank with Johann Tonne- 
sen and Oswald Alving } A villain must be a 
thing of power, handled with delicacy and 
grace. He must be wicked enough to excite 
our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, 
human enough to awaken some transient 
gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his 
downfall, yet not barbarously nor with con- 



A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 8l 

tempt, and the close of his career must be in 
harmony with all its previous development. 
Mrs. Pennell has told us the story of some old 
Venetian witches, who were converted from 
their dark ways, and taught the charms of 
peace and godliness; but who would desire or 
credit the conversion of a witch ? The potency 
of evil lies within her to the end; and when, 
by a few muttered words, she can raise a hell 
storm on the ocean; when her eye's dim fire 
can wither the strength of her enemy; or 
when, with a lock of hair and a bit of wax, she 
can consume him with torturing pain, who 
will welcome her neighborly advances ? The 
proper and artistic end of a witch is at the 
stake — blue flames curling up to heaven, and 
a handful of gray ashes scattered to the wind; 
or, by the working of a stronger spell, she 
may be stiffened into stone, and doomed to 
stand forever on some desolate moor, where, 
underneath starless skies, her evil feet have 
strayed; or perhaps that huge black cat, her 
sinister attendant, has completed his ninth 
year of servitude to nine successive witches, 



82 A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 

and, by virtue of the power granted him at 
their expiration, he may whisk her off bodily 
on St. John's Eve, to offer her a living holo- 
caust to Satan. These are possibilities in strict 
sympathy with her character and history, if 
not with her inclinations; the last is in espe- 
cial accordance with sound Italian tradition, 
and all reveal what Heine calls "the melan- 
choly pleasurable awe, the dark sweet horror, 
of Mediaeval ghost fancies." But a converted 
witch, walking demurely to vesper service, 
gossiping with good, garrulous old women on 
the doorstep, or holding an innocent child 
within her withered arms — the very thought 
repels us instinctively, and fires us with a 
sharp mistrust. Have a care, you foolish 
young mother, and snatch your baby to your 
breast; for even now he waxes paler and paler, 
as those cold, malignant heart-throbs chill his 
breath, and wear his little life away. 

The final disposition of a mere earthly vil- 
lain should likewise be a matter of artistic ne- 
cessity, not a harsh trampling of arrogant vir- 
tue upon prostrate vice. There is no mistake 



A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 83 

SO fatal as that of injustice to the evil element 
of a novel or a play. We all know how, when 
Portia pushes her triumphant casuistry a step 
too far, our sympathies veer obstinately 
around to Shylock's side, and refuse to be re- 
adjusted before the curtain falls. Perhaps 
Shakespeare intended this, — who knows ? — 
and threw in Gratiano's last jeers to madden, 
not the usurer, but the audience. Or perhaps 
in Elizabeth's day, as in King John's, people 
had not grown so finical about the feelings of 
a Jew, and it is only the chilly tolerance of 
our enlightened age which prevents our enjoy- 
ing as we should the devout prejudices of our 
ancestors. But when, in a modern novel, 
guiltless of all this picturesque superstition, 
we see the sinner treated with a narrow, nag- 
ging sort of severity, our unregenerate nature 
rebels stoutly against such a manifest lack of 
balance. Not long ago, I chanced to read a 
story which actually dared to have a villain for 
a hero, and I promised myself much pleasure 
from so original and venturesome a step. But 
how did the very popular authoress treat her 



84 A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 

own creation ? In the first place, when res- 
cued from a truly feminine haze of hints, and 
dark whispers, and unsubstantiated innuendoes, 
the hapless man is proven guilty of but three 
offences: he takes opium, he ejects his tenants, 
and he tries, not very successfully, to mesmer- 
ize his wife. Now, opium-eating is a vice, the 
punishment for which is borne by the offender, 
and which merits as much pity as contempt; 
rack-renting is an unpardonable, but not at all 
a thrilling misdemeanor; and, in these days of 
psychological research, there are many excel- 
lent men who would not shrink from making 
hypnotic experiments on their grandmothers. 
In consequence, however, of such feeble atroc- 
ities, the hero-villain is subjected to a species 
of outlawry at the hands of all the good people 
in the book. His virtuous cousin makes open 
and highly honorable love to his virtuous wife, 
who responds with hearty alacrity. His virtu- 
ous cousin's still more virtuous brother comes 
within an ace of murdering him in cold blood, 
through motives of the purest philanthropy. 
Finally, one of these virtuous young men lets 



A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 85 

loose on him his family ghost, deliberately un- 
sealing the spectral abiding-place; and, while 
the virtuous wife clings around the virtuous 
cousin's neck, and forbids him tenderly to go 
to the rescue, the accommodating spirit — who 
seems to have no sort of loyalty to the con- 
nection — slays the villain at his own doorstep, 
and leaves the coast free for a second marriage 
service. Practically, the device is an admira- 
ble one, because, when the ghost retires once 
more to his seclusion, nobody can well be 
convicted of manslaughter, and a great deal of 
scandal is saved. But, artistically, there is 
something repellent in this open and shame- 
less persecution; in three persons and a hob- 
goblin conspiring against one poor man. Our 
sentiment is diverted from its proper channel, 
our emotions are manifestly incorrect. 

" How are you to get up the sympathies of 
the audience in a legitimate manner," asks Mr. 
Vincent Crummies, '* if there is n't a little man 
contending against a big one ? — unless there's 
at least five to one, and we have n't hands 
enough for that business in our company." 



86. A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 

What would the noble-hearted Mr. Crummies 
have thought of reversing this natural order of 
things, and declaring victory for the multitude? 
How would human nature, in the provinces, 
have supported so novel and hazardous an in- 
novation ? Why should human nature, out of 
the provinces, be assumed to have outgrown 
its simple, chivalrous instincts ? A good, 
strong, designing, despicable villain, or even 
villainess, a fair start, a stout fight, an artistic 
overthrow, and triumphant Virtue smiling 
modestly beneath her orange blossoms — shall 
we ever be too old and world-worn to love 
these old and world-worn things ? 



A BY-WAY IN FICTION 

AT OVV and then the wearied and worn 
^ ^ novel-reader, sick unto death of books 
about people's beliefs and disbeliefs, their con- 
scientious scruples and prejudices, their unique 
aspirations and misgivings, their cumbersome 
vices and virtues, is recompensed for much suf- 
fering by an hour of placid but genuine enjoy- 
ment. He picks up rather dubiously a little, 
unknown volume, and, behold ! the writer 
thereof takes him gently by the hand, and leads 
him straightway into a fair country, where the 
sun is shining, and men and women smile 
kindly on him, and nobody talks unorthodox 
theology, and everybody seems disposed to 
allow everybody else the privilege of being 
nappy in his own way. When to these admi- 
rable qualities are added humor and an atmos- 

87 



88 A BV-WAY IN FICTION 

phcrc of appreciative cultivation, the novel- 
reader feels indeed that his lines have been 
cast in pleasant places, and he is disposed to 
linger along in a very contented and uncritical 
frame of mind. 

There has come to us recently a new and 
beautiful edition of such a little book, pub- 
lished in America, but born of Italian soil and 
sunshine. It has for a title The CJicvalici' of 
Peiisicri-Vani, together witJi Frequent Allu- 
sions to the Prorege 0/ A reo/^ia, which is rather 
an unmerciful string of words to describe so 
gay and easy-going a narrative. It is the first 
full-fledged literary venture of its author, Mr. 
Henry Fuller, also known as Stanton Page, 
whose New England grandfather was a cousin 
of Margaret Fuller's. The story, which is not 
really a story at all, but a series of detached 
episodes, rambles backward and forward in 
such a bewildering fashion that the chapters 
might be all rearranged without materially dis- 
turbing its slender thread of continuity. It is 
equally guiltless of plot or purpose, of dramatic 
incidents or realistic details. The Chevalier may 



A BY-WAY IN FICTION 89 

be found now in Pisa, now in Venice, now in 
Ostia or Ravenna, never driven by the vul- 
gar spur of necessity, always wandering of his 
own free and idle will. He is accompanied 
sometimes by his friend Hors-Concours, an 
Italianized Frenchman from Savoy, and some- 
times by the Prorege of Arcopia, the delight- 
ful Prorege, who gives to the book its best and 
most distinctive flavor. At once dignified and 
urbane, conscious of his exalted position, and 
convinced that he fills it with equal grace and 
correctness, this superb official moves through 
the tale in an atmosphere of autocratic reserve, 
tempered with the most delicate courtesy. 
His ministerial views are as unalterable as the 
rocks, and as sound ; but he listens to the 
democratic ravings of his young American 
protege, Occident, with the good-humored in- 
dulgence one accords to a beloved and preco- 
cious child. It must be confessed that Occident 
fails to make his arguments very convincing, 
or to impress his own personality with any de- 
gree of clearness upon the reader's mind. He 
is at best only a convenient listener to the 



90 A BY-WAY IN FICTION 

Prorege's delicious theories ; he is of real value 
only because the Prorege condescends to talk 
to him. When he ventures upon a truly 
American remark about trying*' to find the 
time" for something, his august friend reminds 
him, with dignity, that "the only man to be 
envied was the man whose time was in some 
degree his own, and the most pitiable object 
that civilization could offer was the rich man a 
slave to his chronometer. Too much had been 
said about the dignity of labor, and not enough 
about the preciousness of leisure. Civilization 
in its last outcome was heavily in the debt of 
leisure, and the success of any society worth 
considering was to be estimated largely by the 
use to which its fortiinati had put their spare 
moments. He wrung from Occident the con- 
fession that, in the great land of which Shelby 
County may be called the centre, activit}-, con- 
sidered of itself and (|uite a[)art from its objects 
and its results, was regarded as a very merito- 
rious thing; and he learned that the bare figure 
of leisure, when exposed to the public gaze, was 
expected to be decorously draped in the gar- 



A BY-WAY IN FICTION 9I 

ment of strenuous endeavor. People were 
supposed to appear busy, even if they were 
not. This gave the Prorege a text for a lit- 
tle disquisition on the difference between lei- 
sure and idleness." 

In fact, a beautiul, cultivated, polished, un- 
marred, well-spent inactivity is the keynote of 
this serene little book; and to understand its 
charm and meaning we have but to follow the 
Chevalier, in the second chapter, to Pisa — to 
Pisa the restful, where "life is not strongly ac- 
centuated by positive happenings, where inci- 
dent is unusual, and drama quite unknown." 
The Chevalier's windows, we are told, faced the 
north, and he sat and looked out of them rather 
more than active persons would deem pleasant 
or profitable. It even happened that the 
Prorege remarked this comfortable habit, and 
demanded of his friend what it was he looked 
at, inasmuch as there seemed to be no appreci- 
able change from day to day. To which the 
Chevalier, in whom " Quietism was pretty suc- 
cessfully secularized ; who knew how to sit still, 
and occasionally enjoyed doing so," replied 



92 A BY-WAY IN FICTION 

with great acumen that what Jiad gone on was 
quite as interesting to him as what was going 
on, and that nothing was more gratifying, from 
his point of view, than that very absence of 
change which had taken his Excellency's at- 
tention — since any change would be a change 
for the worse. 

He is destined, as it chances, to prove the 
truth of his own theories, for it is in Pisa, of all 
places, that he is tempted to throw aside for 
once his role of contemplative philosopher, and 
to assume that of an active philanthropist, with 
very disastrous results. There is an admirable 
satire in the description of the two friends, 
Pensieri-Vani and Hors-Concours, gravely 
plotting to insure the success of an operatic 
debiLtante^ to bring her out in the sunshine of 
their generous patronage, and with the direct 
approval of the Prorege himself, who kindly 
consents to sit in the front of a middle box, and 
to wear a round half-dozen of his most esteem- 
ed decorations. Unhappily, an Italian audience 
does not like to have its enthusiasm expressed 
for it, even by such noble and consummate 



A BY-WAY IN FICTION 93 

critics. As each well-arranged device of flow- 
ers or love-birds in a gilded cage is handed 
decorously forward, the house grows colder 
and more quizzical, until the debutante sees 
herself on the extreme verge of failure, and, 
putting forth all her powers in one appealing 
effort, she triumphs by dint of sheer pluck and 
ability over the fatal kindness of her friends. 
The poor Chevalier, who has in the meantime 
left the theatre with many bitter self-commun- 
ings, receives his lesson in a spirit of touching 
humility, recognizing at once his m.anifest lim- 
itations. "" He perceived that he was less fitted 
to play the part of special providence than he 
had previously supposed; and he brought from 
this experience the immeasurable consolation 
that comes from knowing that very frequently 
in this sadly twisted world, things, if only left 
to their own courses, have a way of coming out 
right in the end." 

The Pisan episode, the delicious journey of 
the Prorege and Pensieri-Vani in search of 
the '' Madonna Incognita," a mysterious and 
illusive Perugino which turns out, after all, to 



94 A BY-WAY IN FICTION 

be a Sodoma, and the memorable excursion to 
Ostia, arc the finest and best-told incidents in 
the book. The story of the Iron Pot is too 
broadly farcical, too Pickwickian in its charac- 
ter, to be in harmony with the rest of the 
narrative; the Contessa's fete at Tusculum is 
so lightly sketched as to be absolutely tanta- 
lizing; and the practical jokes which that lady 
and the Prorege delight in playing upon one 
another are hardly as subtle and acute as we 
would like to find them. Indeed, the Prorege's 
conduct on board his own yacht is so deeply 
objectionable that I, for one, positively refuse 
to believe he was ever guilty of such raw rude- 
ness. It is not kind or right in Mr. Fuller to 
wickedly calumniate this charming and high- 
bred gentleman whom he has given us for a 
friend. Neither is the battle of the Aldines as 
thrilling as might be expected, probably be- 
cause it is impossible to accept the Duke of 
Avon and Severn upon any terms whatever. 
Occident, the American, is misty and ill-defin- 
ed; but he does not lack proportion, only 
vitality. The English duke is a mistake 



A BY-WAY IN FICTION 95 

throughout, a false note that disturbs the at- 
mosphere of serene good temper which is the 
principal attraction of the book; an effort on 
the author's part to be severe and cynical, just 
when we were congratulating ourselves that 
severity and cynicism were things far, far re- 
mote from his tolerant and kindly spirit. 

The excursion to Ostia, however, is enough 
to redeem the whole volume from any charge 
of ill-nature; for if the Contessa does seize this 
opportunity to play one of her dubious tricks 
upon the Prorege, it is not until the little group 
of friends have proved themselves gentle, and 
sympathetic, and full of fine and generous in- 
stincts. It is a delicious bit of description 
throughout. La Nullaniuna has been crowned 
the day before at her Tusculum fete as " the 
new Corinne," and naturally feels that her prop- 
er cue is that of '' genius-blasted fragility," 
overpowered and shattered by her own impas- 
sioned burst of song. With her is the widowed 
Princess Altissimi, her cherished friend and 
foil, a sombre beauty of a grave and chastened 
demeanor, against whose dark background the 



96 A BY-WAY IN FICTION 

Contessa, ** who was fully as flighty, and ca- 
pricious, and tJicdtralc ac a woman of semi- 
genius usually finds it necessary to be, posed 
and fidgeted to her heart's content." The Pro- 
rege, sublimely affable as ever, Pensieri-Vani, 
and young Occident, eager and radiant, make 
up the party; and after the little inn has fur- 
nished them with a noonday meal of unusual 
profusion and elegance, they visit the adjoining 
church at the instigation of the Princess Altis- 
simi, who is anxious to see what this solitary 
and humble temple is like. All that follows is 
so exquisite that I must quote it as it stands, 
in proof of the author's faculty for delicate and 
sympathetic delineation: 

"They were met on the threshold b}' the 
single priest in charge, a dark and sallow 
young man of peasant extraction, whose lonely 
battle with midsummer malaria had left him 
wholly gaunt and enervate. He saluted them 
with the deference which the Church some- 
times shows to the World, though he was too 
true an Italian to be awed, or even embar- 
rassed by their rank; and he brightened up 



A BY-WAY IN FICTION 97 

into something almost like eagerness as he of- 
ferred to do the honors of his charge. The 
Prorege indulgently praised the wretched fres- 
coes which he exhibited so proudly, and the 
Contessa called up a flickering smile of pleas- 
ure in his emaciated face as she feigned an en- 
thusiasm for the paltry fripperies of the high 
altar. This appreciative interest emboldened 
him to suggest their ascent to the gallery, 
where, from his manner, the great treasure of 
the church was to be revealed. The great 
treasure was a small cabinet organ, and Occi- 
dent — triumphing in the ubiquity of the West- 
ern genius, yet somewhat taken back by this 
new illustration of the incongruities it some- 
times precipitated — read upon it a name famil- 
iar to his earliest years. The priest, who evi- 
dently conceived it an impossibility for his 
beloved instrument to be guilty of a discord of 
any kind whatever, pleaded with a mute but 
unmistakable pathos that its long silence might 
now be ended; and the Princess, motioning 
Pensieri-Vani to the keyboard, sang this poor 
solitary a churchly little air, with such a noble 



98 A BY-WAY IN FICTION 

seriousness and such a gracious simplicity as 
to move, not only him, but all the others too. 
Occident, in particular, who kept within him 
quite unimpaired his full share of that fund of 
sensibility which is one of the best products of 
Shelby County, and who would have given 
half his millions just then to have been able to 
sit down and play the simplest tune, implored 
Pensieri-Vani in looks, if not in words, to do 
for him what he himself was so powerless to 
compass; and the Cavaliere, who, like a good 
and true musician, preferred support from the 
lowest quarter to indifference in the highest, 
kept his place until their poor host, charmed, 
warmed through and through, attached again 
to the great body of humanity, could scarcely 
trust himself to voice his thanks. But the 
Princess whispered in the Cavaliere's ear, as 
his series of plain and simple little tunes came 
to an end, that he had not lost since she last 
heard him." 

There is nothing finer in the story than this, 
perhaps nothing quite so good, though all of 
Pensieri-Vani's journeys are fruitful in minute 



A BY-WAY IN FICTION 99 

incidents of a pleasant and picturesque quality. 
It is curious, too, to see how the Chevalier, 
who, except for that catlike scratching about 
the Aldines, is the gentlest and least hurtful 
of men, manifests at times a positive impatience 
of his own refined and peaceful civilization, a 
breathless envy of sterner races and of stormier 
days. When he discovers the tomb of the old 
Etrurian warrior, he is abashed and humbled 
at the thought of that fierce spirit summoned 
from thirty centuries of darkness to see the 
light of this invertebrate and sentimental age; 
requested to forget his deep draughts of blood 
and iron, and to contentedly " munch the 
dipped toast of a flabby humanitarianism, and 
sip the weak tea of brotherly love." When he 
stands in the dim cathedral of Anagni, and 
contemplates the tombs of the illustrious Gae- 
tani family, and the mosaics which blazon forth 
their former splendors, he shrinks with sudden 
shame from the contrast between his feeble, 
forceless will and the rough daring of that 
mighty clan. **The stippling technique of his 
own day seemed immeasurably poor and paltry 



100 A BY-WAY IN FICTION 

compared with the broad, free, sketchy touch 
with which these men dashed off their stirring 
lives; and lie stood confounded before tliat fi- 
ery and robust intensity which, so gloriously in- 
different to the subtilties of the grammarian, 
the niceties of the manicure, and the torments 
of the supersensitive self-analyst, could fix its 
intent upon some definite desire, and move for- 
ward unswervingly to its attainment. Poor 
moderns ! he sighed, who with all our wish- 
ing never reach our end, and with all our think- 
ing never know what we really think." 

These unprofitable musings of the Chevalier's 
seem to reflect some recurring discontent, some 
restless, unchastened yearnings on the part of 
the author himself; but they find no echo in the 
serene breast of the Prorege. He at least is as 
remote from envying the hostilities of the past 
as he is innocent of aspiring to the progres- 
siveness of the future. He is full}' alive to the 
merits of his own thrice-favored land, where 
the evil devices of a wrong-headed generation 
have never been suffered to penetrate: " Arco- 
pia, the gods be praised, was exempt from the 



A BY-WAY IN FICTION lOI 

modern curse of bigness. One chimney was 
not offensive; but a million made a London. 
One refuse-heap could be tolerated; but accu- 
mulated thousands produced a New York. A 
hundred weavers in their own cottages meant 
peaceful industry and home content; a hundred 
hundred, massed in one great factory, meant 
vice and squalor and disorder. Society had 
never courted failure or bid for misery more ar- 
dently than when it had accepted an urban in- 
dustrialism for a basis. . . . Happily the 
Arcopian population, except a fraction that fol- 
lowed the arts and another fraction that fol- 
lowed the sea, was largely agricultural, and ex- 
hibited in high union the chief virtue and the 
chief grace of civilized society — order and pic- 
turesqueness. The disturbing and ungracious 
catch-word, ' Egalite,' had never crossed the 
Arcopian sea; if the Prorege had not been tol- 
erably sure that his mild sway was to be un- 
disturbed by the clangor of cantankerous boil- 
er-makers and the bickerings of a bumptious, 
shopkeeping bourgeoisie, he would never have 
undertaken the task at all. He regarded him- 



102 A BV-WAY IN FICTION 

selfas a just, humane, and sympathetic ruler, but 
he believed that every man should have his 
own proper place and fill it." 

Such are the views smilingly detailed to the 
puzzled and outraged Occident, who, having 
been nourished in boyhood on the discourses of 
rustic theologians, and the forensics of Shelby- 
ville advocates, finds it difficult to assimilate 
his own theories of life with a civilization he 
so imperfectly understands. He doubts his 
ability to take the European attitude, he doubts 
the propriety of the attitude when taken, and 
the struggle ends in the usual manner by his 
marrying a wqfe, and going back to Shelby 
County to be a good citizen for the rest of his 
days. Hors-Concours, mindful of the duties 
entailed on the proprietor of a small patrimony 
and an ancient name, espouses with becoming 
gravity and deliberation the Princess Altis- 
simi. The Prorege retires to Arcopia the 
blessed, whither we would fain follow him if 
we could; and Pensieri-Vani, left desolate and 
alone, consoles himself with the reflection that 
life has many sides, and that Italy has not yet 



A BY-WAY IN FICTION IO3 

given up to him all she has to give: " Others 
might falter; but he was still sufficient unto 
himself, still master of his own time and his 
own actions, and enamored only of that de- 
lightful land whose beauty age cannot wither, 
and whose infinite variety custom can never 
stale." 



COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE 

'' I ^HERE is no place in the world where hu- 
^ man nature is so thoroughly human or 
SO purely natural as on the New York docks, 
when a great steamer load of returning travel- 
ers are being put through the peine forte et 
dure of the United States custom house. 
Everybody is striving to play a part, to assume 
an air of indifference which he does not feel, 
and of innocence which he knows to be falla- 
cious ; and, like Mrs. Browning's Masker, 
everybody betrays too plainly in his ** smiling 
face" and ** jesting bold" the anxiety that 
preys upon his vitals. Packed snugly away in 
that wilderness of trunks and boxes are hun- 
dreds, nay, thousands, of pretty trifles, which 
it is the painful duty of every man, and the 
proud ambition of every woman, to carry in 
unscathed and undetected. The frank, shame- 
less delight which a woman takes in smuggling 

104 



COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE IO5 

has long puzzled the male moralist, who, fol- 
lowing the intricacies of the feminine con- 
science, can find no satisfactory explanation 
of this by-path. He cannot bring her to 
understand why, when she has purchased and 
paid for an article, it should not be hers to 
take where she likes, to deal with as she 
pleases ; and a dozen discourses on political 
economy and the laws of nations leave her un- 
shaken in this simple and primitive conception. 
As the English are said to argue best in pla- 
toons, so a woman argues best in action ; and, 
while her husband or brother is proving to her 
in the clearest possible fashion that a high pro- 
tective tarfrf is a blessing to the land, she is 
assiduously storing away embroidered table 
covers, and silk stockings, and silver spoons, 
and tortoise-shell combs, and tiny jeweled 
pins, and bits of frail Venetian glass, wherever 
her practiced eye tells her they will best escape 
detection. In the abstract, of course, dear 
Edwin is right — he always is — but she is far 
too busy with her task to enter into abstrac- 
tions just now. Whatever mental subtlety she 



I06 COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE 

possesses is reserved for a much more impor- 
tant ordeal — that of getting clear, with a clean 
conscience, from the searching questions of the 
inspector. ** When I am asked if 1 have any 
presents I always answer no," said a devout, 
church-going woman to me one da}\ "be- 
cause I do not consider them presents until I 
give them away." 

The grim, perplexed seriousness with which 
the customs officers play their part makes a 
delightful foil (for the spectators) to the nim- 
ble, elusive mental movements of their adver- 
saries; and it is in the conflict between aggress- 
or and aggrieved, between invader and invaded, 
that the humors of our great national institu- 
tion develop their choicest bloom. The for- 
tunes of war which recently delayed my own 
boxes and my hoped-for escape, gave me, by 
way of compensation, an easy opportunity of 
observing and enjoying the experiences of 
other people, and I was encouraged in my di- 
version by the too evident glee of one of the 
minor actors in the strife. She was a very 
pretty, girl, this gay )'oung combatant, not 



COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE 10/ 

more than sixteen years old, and she sat kick- 
ing her heels on somebody else's trunk, while 
she watched with enviable composure the over- 
hauling of her own. I had seen her often dur- 
ing the homeward voyage, and had spoken to 
her once or twice as she tripped endlessly up 
and down the deck in company with every man 
and boy on board; taking them impartially, 
one by one, and seeming to be on the same 
mysterious terms of intimacy with all. She 
had a traveling companion in the shape of a 
mother who adored her fretfully, and whom she 
treated with finely mingled affection and con- 
tempt. She never spoke of this relative with- 
out the prefix ''poor." ''Poor mother is aw- 
fully sick to-day," she would say in her shrill, 
high-pitched voice, with a laugh which showed 
all her little white teeth, and sounded a trifle 
unsympathetic in our ears. But five minutes 
later she was helping "poor mother" to her 
steamer chair, wrapping her up skilfully in 
half a dozen rugs and shawls, bullying the deck 
steward to bring her some hot bouillon, bully- 
ing her to drink the bouillon when brought. 



I08 COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE 

listening to her manifold complaints witli an 
indulgent smile, and flatly refusing to obey, 
when entreated to put on a warmer jacket. 

" Poor mother is always worrying about 
wraps," was her only acknowledgment of the 
maternal solicitude; and even this remark was 
made, not to her prostrate parent, but to the 
youth who was waiting to bear her away. 

The pair had been traveling alone all sum- 
mer, but were met on the docks by a person 
whom they both called " cousin Jim," and who 
assured them in a hearty, offhand manner that 
he would have them safe through the custom 
house in five minutes; a miscalculation, as it 
turned out, of quite three-quarters of an hour. 
Malignant fate assigned them an inspector who 
settled down to his search like an Indian to 
the war trail, and who seemed possessed with 
the idea that the wealth of the Indies lay se- 
creted somewhere in those two shabby, travel- 
worn boxes. Whether this man was really 
enamored of his disagreeable task, whether 
he conscientiously believed that the United 
States would be impoverished and her indus- 



COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE IO9 

tries crippled by the contents of that modest 
luggage, or whether he had been too pliable 
on former occasions, and seized this chance to 
assert his general incorruptibility, it would be 
hard to determine; but while older and less 
ardent officials lifted out trays and turned over 
corners in a purely perfunctory manner, seeing 
nothing, and seeking to see nothing of what 
lay beneath, this red-hot zealot went thorough- 
ly and exhaustively to work upon the limited 
materials before him. Now the particular irri- 
tation of the custom house lies, not in the fact 
of your trunk being searched, but of your neigh- 
bor's trunk escaping; and the sharpest sting is 
when you chance to know that your neighbor 
is carrying in unmolested ten times the value 
of your dutiable articles. If Miss Maisie, kick- 
ing her heels and smiling affably, did not real- 
ize the hardship of her position, Miss Mai- 
sie's mother — she never had any other name, 
her sole claim to distinction resting on her 
daughter — felt it very keenly. She stood, 
anxious and angry, by the side of the in- 
spector, protesting fretfully at each new in- 



1 lO COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE 

road, and appealing for sympathy to her com- 
panions. 

" It's a perfect shame, the way he has rum- 
pled your dresses, Maisie, and upset that tray 
you packed so nice and close. You will never 
be able to get the things back again in the 
world, and, if you do, one half of them will be 
broken before we reach home. And there's 
your new fur cape all out of fold. I told you 
to wear it, or carry it in on your arm. No ! 
that is not a present; at least I think not, is it, 
Maisie .'* " as a small brown paper parcel, care- 
fully' tied, was held up by the inspector for 
scrutiny. 

" I can't tell till I open it," said the girl, 
reaching over, and very deliberately unfasten- 
ing the string. " You don't remember what 
this is, do you, mother ? Oh ! I sec — a piece 
of camphor. No, it's not a present. We 
brought it from America. Lasts beautifully, 
doesn't it ? " returning the parcel with a smile. 
" Would you mind wrapping it up again ? It's 
so very hard to tie anything in gloves." 

Apparently the inspector did mind, for he 



COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE III 

jerked the lump of camphor unwrapped into 
the trunk, and made a vicious scoop among 
the layers of neatly packed clothing. " Is this 
a present, then ? " he asked, drawing to light a 
flat oblong white box, and snapping the cord 
that bound it. Inside, resting on pink cotton 
wool, was a small silver-backed hand-mirror of 
fine workmanship. *' Surely this must be a pres- 
ent ? " he repeated, with the triumphant air of 
one who has dragged a secret crime to justice. 

Maisie's mother looked nervous, and fidgeted 
visibly, but Maisie herself was imperturbable. 
*' You are mistaken; it is not," she said, with- 
out a tremor. 

The man glanced at her sharply, and 
shrugged his shoulders. " You keep it very 
nicely put away for an article in use," he hint- 
ed, turning over the box once or twice with 
manifest doubt and reluctance. " And these — 
are all these your own, too ? " unearthing from 
some secret receptacle six little card-cases of 
blue leather, and spreading them out jeeringly 
in a row. 

*' I told you not to get so many, Maisie, but 



112 COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE 

you would do it," said her mother, in the hope- 
less tone of a convicted criminal. 

** They were such bargains, I couldn't resist 
them," answered the girl sorrowfully. " Yes, 
they are presents; at least five of them are. I 
guess I will keci) one for myself, and save that, 
any way. Just put one of them back, please. 
And oh, dear ! do you have to lift out that 
heavy tray ? There are nothing but clothes at 
the bottom of the trunk." 

" Nothing at all but clothes," interposed her 
mother peevishly. " I don't see why you have 
to go through everything in this fashion." 

** Nothing at all but clothes," repeated cous- 
in Jim, who had hitherto stood staring silently 
at the confusion before him. " Can't )'ou take 
the ladies' word for it, when they assure you 
there is nothing underneath but clothes ? " 

** My dear sir," said the inspector, exasper- 
ated into insolence, *' I should be very glad to 
take any lady's word, but I can't. I've learned 
a great deal better." 

Maisie's mother colored hotly, with the right- 
eous indignation of a woman who lies easily, 



COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE II3 

and is accused of falsehood; butMaisie, screw- 
ing- her pretty head on one side, winked at 
me in shameless enjoyment of the situation. 
" He'll find I'm right this time," she whispered; 
" but wasn't it lucky he got it into his stupid 
brain that the glass must be a present ! If he 
had said ' commission ' now, I should have 
been caught, and the friend I bought it for 
would be simply furious if I had to pa)^ duty on 
it. Poor mother insisted that I should not 
take a single commission this summer, so I 
only have very few; just that glass, and some 
gloves, of course, and a feather collar, and half 
a dozen pairs of stockings, and a little silk 
shawl from Rome. One girl did ask me to buy 
her a dress in Paris, but I wouldn't do it; and 
another wanted a pair of blue slippers, but for- 
tunately I forgot her size; and another — " 

*' Maisie, dear, do put back your things now," 
interrupted her unhappy parent, who by this 
time was on the verge of tears. " The inspec- 
tor has finished with your trunk, and is going 
to mine. And please be careful of your cape ! 
I wish you had worn it instead — " 



ri4 COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE 

** Instead of my old one ? " said the girl has- 
tily, smoothing down, as she spoke, a very 
handsome and palpably new piece of sealskin 
on her shoulders. ** Poor mother is so blun- 
dering," she sighed softly in my ear. *' I am 
wearing this cape for Dr. Hunsdale. He is 
bringing it home to his sister, and of course 
wouldn't have any shadow of a chance with it 
himself. Indeed, he intended to declare it, 
which would have been a dreadful shame. So 
I just offered to pack mine and wear this one. 
Lots of girls do, you know. I've got a watch 
here for another man, too," lightly touching 
the chatelaine by her side. '* Not a gold one. 
Only a little silver thing he bought for Ids sis- 
ter, wdio is a child. Poor mother doesn't know 
about that, or she would be more miserable 
still; and she is pretty miserable now, isn't 
she } " contemplating her perturbed relative 
with gentle disfavor. "You see, she worries 
so, she makes tliat man believe we have some- 
thing tremendously valuable somewhere, and 
he is bent on finding it out. There, he's after 
our Roman blankets; but tliose are for our- 



COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE II5 

selves, and, what is more," raising her voice,*' we 
have had them in use for nearly three months." 

''Three months isn't long enough," returned 
the official surlily. "You must have had them 
in use a year, to bring them in free." 

" A year ! " echoed Maisie, opening her round 
eyes with innocent amazement. " If you knew 
much about Roman blankets, you wouldn't ex- 
pect anybody to use them for a year, and then 
think them worth bringing home. What a thrif- 
ty lot the custom-house people must be ! Poor 
mother ! She never expected to pay for those, 
and it does seem a little hard on her. But 
what's that he's got now } Oh ! do look ! " for 
the inspector had grabbed something loosely 
wrapped in white tissue paper, and was hold- 
ing it aloft with an exultant shake, and an 
" Fve-tracked-you-at-last " expression. Down 
fell a rubber shoe, of unmistakable American 
manufacture, but richly crusted with layers of 
foreign mud. It flopped modestly into the bot- 
tom of the trunk, and was greeted with a ring- 
ing laugh of genuine, uncontrolled delight. 
"That's a present," sobbed the girl, literally 



Il6 COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE 

choking with mirth, ** and very valuable. We 
brought it from the South Kensington, and are 
going to send it to the Metropolitan Museum 
as soon as we reach home." 

" Maisie, how can }'ou be so foolish ! " pro- 
tested her mother, roused b}^ desperation to 
some faint semblance of authority, and visibly 
anxious to propitiate the inspector, who looked 
ominously angry. " If you will wrap such ab- 
surd things in white tissue paper, naturally 
people think they are of some value." 

" But we had so much tissue paper in Lon- 
don, and nothing else to wrap with," was the 
very reasonable reply. '' Fifteen sheets the 
tailor sent home with my one frock, and I am 
keeping most of it to use at Christmas time. 
Poor old shoe ! " lifting it tenderly out of the 
trunk; "if mud were a dutiable article — and I 
only wonder it isn't — }^ou would come very 
expensive just now. Swiss mud, too, I do be- 
lieve, never brushed off since that da)' at Grin- 
delwald, and cjuitc a rchc. Don't you think," 
turning sucUlcnl)' to me, " don't }"ou really 
tliink all tliis is fearful!)- funn)- .^ " 



COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE 11/ 

In one sense I did, though the fun was of a 
strictly esoteric character, not appealing broad- 
ly to the crowd. But then Mr. Saintsbury as- 
sures us that real fun seldom does. Poor mo- 
ther's sense of humor was plainly unequal to 
the demand made upon it; cousin Jim, who 
had not spoken since his first repulse, looked 
more bewildered than amused; and even the 
inspector did not seem vastly entertained by 
the situation. The trunks had been examined, 
and their contents sadly disarranged; the 
handbags searched, and found to contain only 
toilet articles and underwear; the steamer rugs, 
unrolled, revealed nothing more precious than 
an old magazine and four battered French 
novels. As a result of over half an hour's in- 
quisition, the authorities had possessed them- 
selves of two well-worn Roman blankets, a 
pretty, inexpensive little fan, painted on brown 
linen, a beer mug of Munich ware, and those 
five blue card-cases that had been so cheap in 
Paris. It hardly seemed as if the spoils were 
worth the conflict, or as if the three dollars and 
ninety cents duty charged on them could be a 



Il8 COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE 

serious addition to the revenues of the United 
States. But the home-coming of one poor 
woman had been marred, and no salt-tax of 
ancient France was ever paid with more mani- 
fest reluctance and ill-will. 

" It's the burning injustice of the thing I 
mind, Maisie," was the vehement protest hurled 
at the inspector's back. '* There were plenty 
of people all around whose trunks were hardly 
touched. I watched one man myself, and he 
never lifted out a single thing — ^just turned the 
corners a little, and smoothed all down again. 
He was examining the Hardings's luggage, too, 
and I know they have five times as much as 
we have — really costly, beautiful things — and 
they never paid a cent." 

** But we didn't pay a great deal," returned 
the girl cheerfully. She was down on her knees 
now, deftly rearranging the disordered trunks. 
"Think of all our man might have found, and 
did n't." 

*' Think of the shameful condition he left our 
clothes in ! " said her angry mother. " It is an 
outrage. And those blankets ! Everybody 



COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE II9 

brings them, and nobody but ourselves has to 
pay. The Hardings had them, I know, and so 
did Miss Rebecca Chambers, and Mrs. Starr; 
and they all came in free." 

** Yes, but Mr. Maitland was charged four 
dollars duty on a pair he bought for twenty 
shillings in London, and he presented them to 
the custom-house officers rather than give their 
value over again," said Maisie triumphantly. 

" Did he, really ?" cried her mother, bright- 
ening up wonderfully under the beneficent in- 
fluence of other people's misfortunes. *' What 
a shame ! Four dollars duty on twenty-shil- 
ling blankets ! I never heard of anything so 
preposterous." 

" Yes, and Dr. Carson gave *them a silver 
watch he had brought over for his little boy, 
rather than pay the duty on that, it was so 
high," continued Maisie, who seemed to know 
the fate and fortunes of every passenger on 
board. 

Her mother's face relaxed from fretfulness 
into smiles. " I wonder he doesn't sue the gov- 
ernment, or something," she remarked, with 



120 COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE 

feminine vagueness. " I am sure I should. It 
is a good thing, Maisie, we had no watches to 
bring." 

The girl chuckled softly, and shook the little 
chatelaine by her side. ''Yes, it is a good 
thing," she said, with an air of simple convic- 
tion. *' After all, we did get off pretty cheap. 
And it was almost worth the money to sec the 
delicious flourish with which that muddy old 
overshoe tumbled on the scene. Don't yoii 
think," turning once more appealingly to me, 
" that three dollars and ninety cents was little 
enough to pay for such a sight } " 

Perhaps I did. A laugh is always worth its 
price, and in these serious days grows rare at 
any figure. Besides, when a great republic con- 
descends to play an active part in even an in- 
different comedy, it is ill-timed to grumble at 
the cost. 



MR. WILDE'S INTENTIONS 

T^ VER since the first printers with mis- 
-* — ' guided zeal dipped an innocent world 
in ink, those books have been truly popular 
which reflected faithfully and enthusiastically 
the foibles and delusions of the hour. This 
is what is called " keeping abreast with the 
spirit of the times," and we have only to look 
around us at present to see the principle at 
work. With an arid and dreary realism chilling 
us to the heart, and sad-voiced novelists entreat- 
ing us at every turn to try to cultivate indecorous 
conduct and religious doubts, fiction has ceased 
to be a medium of delight. Even nihilism, which 
is the only form of relief that true earnestness 
permits, is capable of being overstrained, and 
some narrowly conservative people are begin- 
ning to ask themselves already whether this 
new development of '' murder as a fine art " 
has not been sufficiently encouraged. Out of 

121 



122 MR. WILDE'S INTENTIONS 

the midst of the gloom, out of the confusion 
and depression of conflicting forms of serious- 
ness, rises from London a voice, clear, languid, 
musical, shaken with laughter, and speaking 
in strange, sweet tones of art and beauty, and 
of that finer criticism which is one with art 
and beauty, and claims them forever as its 
own. The voice comes from Mr. Oscar Wilde, 
and few there are who listen to him, partly 
because his philosophy is alien to our preva- 
lent modes of thought, and partly because of 
the perverse and paradoxical fashion in which 
he delights to give it utterance. People are 
more impressed by the Avay a thing is said 
than by the thing itself. A grave arrogance 
of demeanor, a solemn and self-assertive meth- 
od of reiterating an opinion until it grows 
weighty with words, are weapons more con- 
vincing than any subtlety of argument. " As 
I have before expressed to the still reverber- 
ating discontent of two continents " — this is the 
mode in which the public loves to have a state- 
ment offered to its ears, that it may gape, and 
wonder, and acquiesce. 



MR. WILDE'S INTENTIONS 1 23 

Nothing can be further from such admirable 
solidity than Mr. Wilde's flashing sword-play, 
than the glee with which he makes out a case 
against himself, and then proceeds valiantly 
into battle. There are but four essays in the 
volume, rather vaguely called Intentions, d.nd of 
these four only two have real and permanent 
value. *' The Truth of Masks " is a somewhat 
trivial paper, inserted apparently to help fill up 
the book, and '* Pen, Pencil, and Poison " is vis- 
ibly lacking in sincerity. The author plays with 
his subject very much as his subject, " kind, 
light-hearted Wainwright," played with crime, 
and in both cases there is a subtle and discord- 
ant element of vulgarity. It is not given to our 
eminently respectable age to reproduce the 
sumptuous and horror-laden atmosphere which 
lends an artistic glamor to the poisonous court 
of the Medicis. This "study in green " contains, 
however, some brilliant passages, and at least 
one sentence — " The domestic virtues are not 
the true basis of art, though they may serve as 
an excellent advertisement for second-rate 
artists " — that must make Mr. George Moore 



124 MR. WILDE'S INTENTIONS 

pale with envy, when he reflects that he missed 
saying it, where it belongs, in his clever, 
truthful, ill-natured paper on " Mummer-Wor- 
ship." 

The significance and the charm of Mr. 
Wilde's book are centred in its opening chap- 
ter, *' The Decay of Lying," reprinted from 
TJie Nineteenth Century, and in the long two- 
part essay, entitled " The Critic as Artist," 
which embodies some of his most thoughtful, 
serious, and scholarly work. My own ineffable 
content rests with " The Decay of Lying," be- 
cause, under its transparent mask of cynicism, 
its wit, its satire, its languid mocking humor, 
lies clearly outlined a great truth that is slip- 
ping fast away from us — the absolute inde- 
pendence of art — art nourished by imagination 
and revealing beauty. This is the hand that 
gilds the grayness of the world; this is the 
voice that sings in flute tones through the si- 
lence of the ages. To degrade this shining 
vision into a handmaid of nature, to maintain 
that she should give us photographic pictures 
of an unlovely life, is a heresy that arouses m 



MR. WILDE'S INTENTIONS 1 25 

Mr. Wilde an amused scorn which takes the 
place of anger. '* Art," he says, " never ex- 
presses anything- but itself. It has an inde- 
pendent life, just as Thought has, and develops 
purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily 
realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in 
an age of faith. So far from being the creation 
of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to 
it, and the only history that it preserves for us 
is the history of its own progress." That we 
should understand this, it is necessary to un- 
derstand also the ** beautiful untrue things" 
which exist only in the world of fancy; the 
things that are lies, and yet help us to endure 
the truth. Mr. Wilde repudiates distinctly and 
almost energetically all lying with an object, 
all sordid trifling with a graceful gift. The 
lies of newspapers yield him no pleasure; the 
lies of politicians are ostentatiously unconvin- 
cing; the lies of lawyers are " briefed by the 
prosaic." He reviews the world of fiction with 
a swift and caustic touch; he lingers among 
the poets; he muses rapturously over those 
choice historic masterpieces, from Herodotus 



126 MR. WILDES INTENTIONS 

to Carlyle, where ** facts are either kept in 
their proper subordinate position, or else en- 
tirely excluded on the general ground of dul- 
ness." He laments with charming frankness 
the serious virtues of his age. " i\Iany a young 
man," he says, " starts in life with a natural 
gift for exaggeration, which, if nurtured in con- 
genial and sympathetic surroundings, or by 
the imitation of the best models, might grow 
into something really great and wonderful. 
But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either 
falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes 
to frequenting the society of the aged and the 
well-informed. Both things are equally fatal 
to his imagination, and in a short time he de- 
velops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth- 
telling, begins to verify all statements made in 
his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting 
people who are much younger than himself, 
and often ends b}' writing novels that are so 
like life that no one can possibly believe in 
their probabilit)'." Surely this paragraph has 
but one peer in the world of letters, and that 
is the immortal sentence wherein De Ouincey 



MR. WILDE'S INTENTIONS 12/ 

traces the murderer's gradual downfall to in- 
civility and procrastination. 

''The Critic as Artist" affords Mr. Wilde 
less scope for his humor and more for his eru- 
dition, which, perhaps, is somewhat lavishly 
displayed. Here he pleads for the creative 
powers of criticism, for its fine restraints, its 
imposed self-culture, and he couches his plea 
in words as rich as music. Now and then, it 
is true, he seems driven by the whips of our 
modern Furies to the verge of things which are 
not his to handle — problems, social and spir- 
itual, to which he holds no key. When this 
occurs, we can only wait with drooping heads, 
and what patience we can muster, until he is 
pleased to return to his theme; or until he re- 
members, laughing, how fatal is the habit of 
imparting opinions, and what a terrible ordeal 
it is to sit at table with the man who has spent 
his life in educating others rather than himself 
" For the development of the race depends on 
the development of the individual, and where 
self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the in- 
tellectual standard is instantly lowered, and 



128 MR. WILDE'S INTENIIONS 

often ultimately lost." I like to fancy the 
ghost of the late Rector of Lincoln, of him who 
said that an appreciation of Milton was the re- 
ward of consummate scholarship, listeninc^ in 
the Elysian Fields, and nodding his assent to 
this much-neglected view of a much-disputed 
question. Everybody is now so busy teaching 
that nobody has any time to learn. We are 
growing rich in lectures, but poor in scholars, 
and the triumph of mediocrity is at hand. Mr. 
Wilde can hardly hope to become popular by 
proposing real study to people burning to im- 
part their ignorance; but the criticism that 
develops in the mind a more subtle quality of 
apprehension and discernment is the criticism 
that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the 
aire. 



HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 

*'^ I ^HERE does not, at this blessed moment, 
^ breathe on the earth's surface a human 
being that willna prefer eating and drinking to 
all ither pleasures o' body or soul." So speaks 
the Ettrick Shepherd, in the fulness of his con- 
tent, contemplating with moist eyes the groan- 
ing supper-table, laden with a comfortable 
array of solid viands; after which fair and 
frank expression of his views Ave are somewhat 
pained to hear him denouncing in no measured 
terms " the awful and fearsome vice o' glut- 
tony," as evidenced occasionally in women. 
His companions, too, those magnificent fellow- 
feeders, have a great many severe things to 
say about gudewives who betray a weakness 
for roasted pork, or an unfeminine solicitude for 
gravy; and Mr. Timothy Tickler unhesitating- 
ly affirms that such a one, *' eating for the sake 

of eating, and not for mere nourishment, is, in 

129 



130 HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 

fact, the grossest of sensualists, and at each 
mouthful virtually breaks all ten of the com- 
mandments." This is the language of an as- 
cetic rather than of a bon vivaiit, but we are in 
some measure reassured when the same Mr. 
Tickler confesses, a little later, that, although 
roast goose always disagrees with him, yet 
he never refuses it, believing that to purchase 
pleasure by a certain degree of pain is true 
philosophy; whereupon the Shepherd, not to 
be outdone, gives it as his unreserved opinion 
that, in winter-time at least, *' eating for eat- 
ing's sake, and in oblivion o' its feenal cause, 
is the most sacred o' household duties." 

From these somewhat inharmonious senti- 
ments we reluctantly infer that gluttony is a 
vice — or a virtue — for man only, and that wo- 
man's part in the programme is purely that of 
a ministering angel. Adam was made to eat, 
and Eve to cook for him, although, even in this 
humble sphere, she and her daughters have 
been doomed to rank second in command. 
Excellent in all things, but supreme in none, 
they have never yet scaled the dazzling 



HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY I3I 

heights of culinary fame. The records of an- 
tiquity make no mention of their skill; the 
middle ages grant them neither praise nor 
honor; and even as late as Dr. Johnson's day 
they labored hard for scanty recognition. It 
is very painful to hear the great sage speaking 
lightly of our grandmother's oracle, Mrs. 
Glasse, and declaring with robust contempt 
that women were fit to spin, but not to write a 
book of cookery. Yet for how many years had 
they modestly held their peace; profiting, 
doubtless, in many a roomy kitchen and in 
many a well-stocked buttery by the words of 
wisdom which vainglorious men let fall; and 
only now and then giving help and counsel to 
one another by means of little private recipe- 
books, which were circulated among a few 
noble families, and were considered as their 
own exclusive property and pride. 

Opulence and a taste for display, upon the 
one side, and the natural conservatism of the 
great Saxon stock, upon the other, fought the 
battle of the table from the days of the Black 
Prince down to those of Anthony Trollope, 



132 HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 

and will, in all probability, fight it to the end. 
** A cod's head for fourpence, and nine shil- 
lings' worth of condiments to serve with it," 
was the favorite sarcasm which greeted the 
growing extravagance of the rich middle 
classes. Those costly "subtleties" imported 
from French kitchens in the fifteenth century 
met with a sturdy opposition from British free- 
men, who, even while they gaped and marvel- 
ed, resented such bewildering innovations. 
The pelican sheltering her young, and Saint 
Catherine, book in hand, disputing with the 
doctors, which figured among the dishes . at 
the coronation of Henry V.; the hundred and 
four ''dressed" peacocks, trailing their plumes 
gorgeously over the table at the consecration 
of Archbishop Neville, affronted more than 
one beef-eating gentleman, and exasperated 
more than one porridge-eating churl. From 
France, too, came certain heresies regarding 
the fitness of food which Englishmen had for 
centuries devoured and dici'ested. Oueen 
Elizabeth dined upon whale; Cardinal Wol- 
sey, who was something of an epicure, and 



HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 1 33 

who first taught us that strawberries and cream 
were intended by a beneficent nature to set off 
each other's merits, did not disdain to have a 
young porpoise served up at one of his ban- 
quets. Fish soup was a deHcacy, and we are 
even assured by antiquarians that the gram- 
pus, or sea-wolf, was freely eaten by our 
strong-stomached ancestors. 

But foreign cooks looked doubtfully upon 
these national dainties, and, in place of the 
old-time gravies, which were simply the broths 
in which meat had been boiled, flavored with 
a little ginger and sugar, delicate and highly 
seasoned sauces were devised for the tempting 
of weary appetites. Italy sent forks — those 
curious and uncanny implements — which were 
received with scornful indignation, as calcu- 
lated to destroy the simplicity and manliness 
of Great Britain. Spoons and knives were 
held in slight esteem, for good soup could be 
swallowed from the bowl, and his sacred Maj- 
esty, Charles XII. of Sweden, was not the only 
monarch who buttered his bread with his royal 
thumb. But forks were contemptible affecta- 



134 HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 

tions. As honest Master Breton observed, he 
had done no foul work, and handled no un- 
wholesome thing-, and consequently had no 
need of an instrument with which to make hay 
of his food and pitch it into his mouth. So, 
too, the time-honored custom of man and wife 
eating out of one trencher was falling into 
rapid disuse, and Walpole tells us that the old 
Duke and Duchess of Hamilton were the last 
couple in England who retained the fashion of 
their youth. Meats were growing daintier and 
dearer all the while. The ordinary or inn 
dinner, which in Elizabeth's day cost sixpence, 
had risen to tenpence in the reign of George I., 
and soon crept up to a shilling. In every 
generation there were plenty of grumblers to 
lament over the good old times that had fled, 
and we catch the echo of this undying cry in 
the modern protests against unwelcome fash- 
ions. Thackeray and Trollope railed perpet- 
ually at that feeble striving after an impossible 
elegance which had well-nigh destroyed the 
cheery conviviality of their youth ; and Pea- 
cock, the prince of good livers, with whom the 



HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 135 

pleasures of the intellect and the appetite 
walked amicably hand in hand, has recorded 
his still more vehement denunciation : '* I de- 
test and abominate," says Mr. Macborrowdale, 
" the idea of a Siberian dinner, where you just 
look on fiddle-faddles, while your meal is be- 
hind a screen, and you are served with rations 
like a pauper." 

The scorn of the true Briton for alien delica- 
cies was repaid with interest by the French- 
man, who regarded his neighbor's groaning 
table very much as we might regard the doubt- 
ful provender of a cannibal chief. The con- 
tempt for frog-eating foreigners, on the one 
hand, was not greater than the contempt for 
beef-eating islanders, on the other ; in fact, all 
nations, from Egypt down, seem to have cher- 
ished a wholesome dislike and distrust for each 
other's food. The British officer who, at the 
attack on Cadiz, shouted to his men, '' You 
Englishmen, who are fed upon beef, don't surely 

mean to be beaten by a d d lot of Spaniards, 

who live on oranges ! " made a stronger appeal 
to human nature than did Napoleon with his 



136 HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 

famous ''forty centuries ;" and the reverse of 
the medal may be seen in Talleyrand's de- 
scription of England, as a land where there 
were twenty-four religions and only one sauce. 
Twenty-four religions would make but a poor 
showing in these days, when even a serious 
novel can beget a new one ; but sauces are not 
so lightly called into being. Those " slibber 
sops " which brought " queesiness to the stom- 
ach and disquiet to the mind " of John L}'ly 
were hard to rout from the field ; and they 
were still holding their own when Brillat-Sav- 
arin, the most serene and kindly of epicures, 
first visited Great Britain. With Savarin, eat- 
ing was more than a mere vulgar pleasure; 
it was a solemn and yet exquisite duty which 
man owed to himself, and to a generous nature 
that had yielded him up her bounties for this 
purpose. Mr. Birrell says that Burke's letters 
on carrots " tremble with emotion," and there 
is a like earnestness about all of Savarin's rec- 
ipes ; a pathetic anxiety lest some ingredient 
should be omitted or ill-used. For fish he 
entertains a profound respect ; for game, a 



HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 1 3/ 

manly affection ; for pastries, a delicate regard ; 
but truffles are the beloved darlings of his 
heart. It contents him greatly to sit at table 
with congenial spirits; to watch "the eager- 
ness of desire, the ecstasy of enjoyment, and, 
finally, the perfect repose of bliss on every 
countenance," when the noble meal is ended. 
Surely even the Reign of Terror might have 
dealt tenderly with such a man as this, since 
patriots are unswerving eaters, and it behooved 
them to remember that "the discovery of a 
new dish does more for the happiness of man- 
kind than the discovery of a new planet." 

All of Savarin's apothegms evince the same 
frank and warm-hearted regard for the wel- 
fare of others; the same unremitting anxiety 
to teach them what to eat and how to eat it. 
He entreats us never to forget that, when we 
have invited a man to dine, we have, for a 
short time at least, his happiness in our hands. 
The dinner table, he reminds us, is the only 
place where men are not hopelessly bored for 
the first hour, and during that hour it is our 
privilege to make them enamored of life. A 



138 HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 

cook is, in his eyes, a true scientist, with 
mighty capacities for good and evil. He be- 
lieves, with Baudelaire, that such a one should 
have the soul of a poet, and — Hke the too fas- 
tidious Parisian, who declared that between 
Mme. du Deffand's cJicf and the Marquise de 
Brinvilliers *' there was only the difference of 
intention " — Savarin has no words of reproach 
strong enough for those who debase and shame 
their noble calling. He is prompt to recognize 
the exigencies of a slender purse, and unweary- 
ing in his efforts to provide Dicniis fitted to its 
limitations; but his notions of economy are 
somewhat like those of the little French prin- 
cess, who said that rather than starve she 
would live on bread and cheese. The famous 
omelette ail tJion, for instance, with all its air 
of pastoral simplicity, contains the roes of two 
carp, a piece of tunny, an eschalot, twelve eggs, 
and a number of other ingredients \\hich 
would hardly recommend it to a poor country 
parsonage. As for the Abbe Chevrier's spin- 
ach, which was warmed up with butter for 
seven days before it reached the acme of deli- 



HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 1 39 

cacy, we can only wonder at the admirable 
patience of the Abbe's cook, who would return 
seven times with unremitting industry to the 
consideration of a single dish. 

It will be observed, however, how many gas- 
tronomical triumphs we owe to clerical genius, 
or to the researches of the true philosopher. 
Lord Bacon thought it no shame to bend his 
mighty mind to kitchen problems, and Dr. 
Nowel, the learned and pious dean of St. Paul's, 
was rightfully proud of the bottled beer which 
he first gave to his astonished and grateful 
country. The earliest list of recipes in Eng- 
land was the work of an archbishop. The 
Jesuits in the seventeenth century carried the 
turkey from its native haunts, and introduced 
it to the best French society, who received it 
with the rapture it deserved. The famous 
mayonnaise is not the only delicacy which 
Richelieu bequeathed to the world ; Talley- 
rand devoted one hour out of every busy day 
to the exclusive companionship of his cook ; 
and the Regent Orleans was pleased to give 
his own name to the bread of his own baking. 



140 HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 

What a kindly spirit of good-fellowship we 
discern in the frank epicureanism of Sydney 
Smith ! what generous sympathy for a bon 
vivaiit whose lines have led him into desert 
places ! '* Luttrell came over for a da}-," he 
writes, " from whence I know not, but I 
thought not from good quarters ; at least he 
had not his usual soup and patti look. There 
was a forced smile upon his countenance which 
seemed to indicate plain roast and boiled, a 
sort of apple-pudding depression, as if he had 
been staying with a clergyman." How credit- 
able, too, is his anxiety to please Luttrell, 
when that amiable sybarite becomes Jiis guest! 
"Mrs. Sydney," he declares, "grows pale with 
alarm as the rich dishes are uncovered ; " and 
yet so admirable a housewife might have shared 
in the superb confidence of Lord Worcester 
when cautioned by Sir Henry Halford to leave 
all such indiscreet messes alone. " Side 
dishes," said the great physician, "are poison." 
" Yours may be," retorted Lord Worcester ; 
" and I should never dream of eating them, 
but mine are a very different story." So, too, 



HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY I4I 

were Sydney Smith's, and the celebrated salad 
which gained for him nearly as wide a reputa- 
tion as his wit was only one of many famous 
recipes, and probably no greater in its way 
than the mysterious pudding whose secret he 
imparted as an especial favor to the importu- 
nate Lady Holland. Those who had the happi- 
ness of sitting at his table rose from it with 
tranquil gratitude, *' serenely full," and con- 
scious, let us hope, of his own graceful senti- 
ment, 

" Fate cannot harm me — I have dined to-day." 

There is one more subject to consider ; one 
more aspect of the case, fraught with tender 
and melancholy associations. Like the lost 
joys of our youth ; like the taste for apple- 
dumplings, which Lamb recognized as belong- 
ing only to those whose innocence was unim- 
paired ; like the vanishing of gentle thoughts 
with a growing distaste for asparagus ; so is 
the sorrowful blank left in our lives by the 
recollection of noble dishes that have been, 
and that are no longer. What of that lost rec- 



142 HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 

ipc of Menander's for fish sauce — an ambrosial 
sauce whose fame has flitted down to us from 
dim ages, and the eating of which would have 
filled to the brim Dr. Johnson's cup of happi- 
ness ? And what of its modern counterpart, 
now also gone forever, the famous green sauce 
which La Coste offered to Sir Thomas Dundas 
at the Duke of York's table, whispering to 
him with unctuous fervor, '' Avec ccttc sauce la, 
on pcntrrait inaugcr son grand-pcrc " ? What 
of the bream-pie that disappeared with the 
good monks, driven from British soil, and the 
mere recollection of which caused Peacock to 
bewail in spirit the too rapid dissolution of the 
monasteries ? And what of sack — F.alstaff's 
sack — that made England the merry Eng- 
land of yore, and that took flight, like some 
old-fashioned genius, before the sombre da}'s 
that were to follow ? Surely if we knew its 
secret, we should learn how to laugh once 
more. 

But alas ! this may not be. We have but 
the memories of past good cheer ; we have but 
the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we 



HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 143 

look and listen for the mirth that has died 
away. In vain we seek to question the gray 
ghosts of old-time revelers. 

" Still shall this burden their answer bear, 
What has become of last year's snow.? " 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 

1\ /r R. RUDYARD KIPLING has prefaced 
^^ ^ his little volume o( C ////(/ St or ics with 
a modest intimation that he finds the subject 
almost beyond his grasp. He says : 

" Onlywomen understand children thoroughly; but 
it a mere man keeps very quiet, and humbles himself 
properly, and refrains from talking down to his supe- 
riors, the children will sometimes be good to him, and 
let him see what they think about in tlie world. Yet, 
even after patient investigation and the condescension 
of the nursery, it is hard to draw babies." 

This sounds disarming, and at the same time 
strikes a popular note respecting these fortu- 
nate little people, who, after having been con- 
sidered for many }'ears as unworthy of the 
noxxdist's regard, have now suddenly grown 
too complex and subtle for him to hope to un- 
derstand. Mr. Kipling himself approaches 
them with great caution, and treats them with 

careful conventionality, except in that pitiful 

144 



CHILDREN IN FICTION I45 

bit of realism, " Baa, Baa, Black Sheep," where 
the misery and swift deterioration of a child 
are almost too painfully portrayed. Punch, 
with his dim comprehension of his own un- 
happiness, and his pathetic attempts to be 
friendly and "oblige everybody;" Punch, 
swaying alternately from clumsy deception to 
helpless rage, badgered into sullenness, and 
betrayed by the inherent weakness of his poor, 
peace-loving little soul, is a picture burdened 
with bitter truth, drawn with revengeful fidel- 
ity. Once, I am sure, a half-blind, solitary 
boy measured those lonely rooms in hand 
spans: '* fifty down the side, thirty across, and 
fifty back again — one hundred and eighty-one 
exactly from the hall door to the top of the 
first landing." Once, I am sure, he knocked 
his blundering head against the walls, and up- 
set the glasses that he tried to grasp, in the 
gathering gloom of his doubly darkened life. 

But when we turn from the sad sincerity of 
''Black Sheep " to the brighter atmosphere of 
the other tales, we find nothing very genuine or 
convincing about the happier children who figure 



146 CHILDREN IN FICTION 

in them. " Drums of the Fore and Aft" is an 
exceedingly clever story, and Lew and Jakin 
may be typical British drummer boys, but to 
the uninitiated reader they seem a trifle over- 
drawn both for good and evil. They know so 
much and talk so marvelously ; they are so very 
bad and so very upright; and they insert such a 
bewildering number of '' bloomin's " into their 
conversation, that, like the eternal '* well " with 
which Mr. Howells's women begin all their sen- 
tences, the word loses its vraisciiiblancc through 
unbearable repetition. '' His Majesty the King," 
even when we forgive him his cumbersome 
title which destroys all good-fellowship at 
once, is a child dear to story-writers, and con- 
secrated to their uses for many years, but so 
exceedingly rare in every-day life that he has 
to be taken strictly on faith; while "Wee Wil- 
lie Winkie " is even more unveracious in his 
character. These wonderful babes, with their 
sense of honor, and chivalry, and manhood, 
these Ba)'ards in pinafores, these miniature 
editions of King Arthur and Sir Launcclot 
rolled into one, are picturesque possibilities 



CHILDREN IN FICTION I47 

only when we have forgotten what an earthly 
little animal a real boy is. Willie Winkie rides 
into a forbidden and dangerous country to 
protect and rescue a woman nearly old enough 
to be his mother. He is keenly and conscien- 
tiously distressed because, having been told to 
keep within doors, he has thus " bwoken " his 
** awwest ; " but he feels it his paramount duty 
to pursue and guard from evil the able-bodied 
betrothed of his father's friend. When Miss 
Allardyce accommodates herself to circum- 
stances by promptly wrenching her ankle, and 
the pair are surrounded by ruffians of the skulk- 
ing, cowardly Indian type whom Mr. Kipling 
paints with such generous scorn, we are grave- 
ly told : '' Then rose from the rock Wee Wil- 
lie Winkie, child of the Dominant Race, aged 
six and three-quarters, and said briefly and 
emphatically, 'Jaof' What ''Jao'' means is 
lost to our occidental ignorance, but the effect 
is magical. The twenty armed men thus con- 
fronted and defied are awed into milder meas- 
ures, and finally routed with shame, while the 
hero of the hour restores the prostrate heroine 



148 CHILDREN IN FICTION 

unharmed — save for the wrenched ankle — to 
her lover's anxious embraces. 

This is very amusing-, but a little absurd, 
and a little vulgar as well. It strikes that jar- 
ring note of provincialism which Matthew Ar- 
nold condemns with all the weight of his criti- 
cal eloquence in Kinglake's " Invasion of the 
Crimea." "Wee Willie Winkie, child of the 
Dominant Race," is on a literary level with 
the description of Marshal St. Arnaud, cowed 
by "the majesty of the great Elchi's Canning 
brow and tight, merciless lips ; " a st)'le of 
writing bad enough in newspaper correspond- 
ence, but unpardonable in artistic fiction. How 
has it happened that Mr. Kipling, who tells us 
with such irresistible grace and simplicity the 
" Story of Muhammad Din," should stray into 
mock heroics when handling the children of 
his own nation, the jolly well-bred little Eng- 
lish lads, to whom all pictin-esque posing is an 
art unknown. 

Perhaps the trouble lies in the curious but 
highly esteemed fallac}' that the child of fiction 
is expected to be always precocious and spright- 



CHILDREN IN FICTION I49 

ly, to emit sparks like a cat, and electrify the 
sluggish atmosphere about him. He does this 
at the expense alike of his sincerity and of his 
manners ; we cannot accept him as a fact, and we 
don't approve of him as a theory. A few years 
ago a critic in the Contemporary Review pro- 
tested very seriously against such writers as 
Florence Montgomery, ** by whom the bloom 
of unconsciousness has been wiped from child- 
hood, and boys and girls have learned to see 
themselves, not like old-fashioned children, as 
good and naughty, but as picturesque beings, 
whose naughtiness has an attractive charm, 
and whose very imperfections of dialect are 
worth accurate record." Most of us are only 
too familiar with this kind of fiction, which for 
a time enjoyed such great and hurtful populari- 
ty. The patronizing attitude of children to their 
parents is sufficiently illustrated by the really 
nice little boy in " Transformed," who calls his 
father *' Puppy," a most objectionable thing 
for a nice little boy to do; while what might 
be termed the corrective attitude of children 
to their parents is still more sharply defined 



150 CHILDREN IN FICTION 

by that unpleasant child, Nina Middleton, who 
sees so clearly, and suffers so intensely from 
the " careless superficiality " and rigid narrow- 
ness of the unfortunate couple whose painful 
privilege it was to have given her birth. 

One of the latest types, however, to seize and 
hold the hearts of the big, sentimental, child- 
loving public is Mrs. Burnett's Lord Fauntleroy, 
who maybe best described as the good little boy 
with the clothes. It is quite impossible to sep- 
arate him in our minds from his wardrobe, to 
divest him of his velvet suits and sashes, his 
' "rich Vandyke lace collar," his leggings and 
neat little Oxford tics. He is always and in all 
places ''a small copy of the fairy prince," pic- 
turesquely grouped with a dog, or a cat, or a 
pony, as circumstances direct. We cannot be 
coarse enough to imagine him with cropped 
hair, and muddy boots, and a torn jacket, and 
a hole in his stocking, like so many, many real 
little boys who daily break their mothers' 
hearts by their profound neglect of appear- 
ances. He is so ready in conversation, too, 
and pays such charming ccKnpliments to pretty 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 151 

young ladies, instead of hustling into corners 
and staring owlishly, after the fashion of those 
awkward little boys I know. And he is so 
very, very good ! Not consciously and mor- 
bidly virtuous like that baby prig, Little Saint 
Elizabeth, who comes from the same hands, 
but artlessly and inevitably correct. He gives 
all his money to pay poor Michael's rent, and 
we rejoice rightly in his generosity, with only 
one wistful recollection of that vastly different 
specimen of boyhood, for whose misdeeds Mr. 
Aldrich is responsible, and who spends his 
funds gloriously in indigestible treats to his 
friends. It is very charming in Lord Faun- 
tleroy to offer his eager plea in behalf of the 
farmer Higgins, and probably just what any 
warm-hearted child would have done in his 
place; but we cannot but contrast his wonder- 
ful unconsciousness afterward, " not realizing 
his own importance in the least," with the fa- 
miliar figure of little Paul Dombey strutting up 
and down the room at Brighton, full of the 
new-blown dignity of being a financier, and 
lending young Gay the money for his uncle. 



152 CHILDREN IN FICTION 

It would take the sternest of moralists to ob- 
ject to Paul's infantile strut; it would take the 
most trusting of sentimentalists to believe that 
Cedric is quite as innocently unconscious as he 
seems. 

There is a remarkably nice little girl in that 
pleasant English novel, published a few years 
ago, Sir diaries Danvers — a little girl who 
can be safely recommended to all child-lovers, 
who will only wish they could hear a great 
deal more about her. Molly Danvers is not 
particularly precocious; she is not at all super- 
sensitive, and w^e are not even told that she is 
pretty. There is absolutely no inventory given 
of her personal charms; and as to her clothes, 
" a white frock and two slim black legs" are 
casually mentioned on her first introduction, 
and we never hear another word about them. 
"A white frock and two slim black legs!" 
Could any description be more meagre .'' Imag- 
ine Little Saint Elizabeth, or Sara Crewe, re- 
duced ruthlessly to a white frock, and not an- 
other allusion to their wardrobes in the whole 
course of their histories. But Molly does n't 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 1 53 

care. I have a suspicion that her v/hite frocks 
don't stay white very long, and that her sHm 
black legs are better distinguished for activity 
than for grace. She is anything but heroic, 
and runs fleetly away from danger, leaving both 
her cousin and her donkey to their fate; but she 
has a loving little heart, nevertheless, and when 
her terrier dies, this heart is as nearly broken 
as a healthy little girl's can be. 

" ' He is dead, Uncle Charles. He was quite well, 
and eating Albert biscuits with the dolls this morning, 
and now ' — the rest was too dreadful, and Molly burst 
into a flood of tears, and burrowed with her head 
against the faithful waistcoat of Uncle Charles — of 
Uncle Charles, the friend, the consoler of all the ills 
that Molly had so far been heir to. 

"'Vic had a very happy life, Molly,' said Charles, 
pressing the little brown head against his cheek, and 
vaguely wondering what it would be like to have any 
one to turn to in time of trouble. 

" ' I always kept trouble from him except that time 
I shut him in the door,' gasped Molly. ' I never took 
him out in a string, and he only wore his collar — that 
collar you gave him that made him scratch so — on Sun- 
days.' 

" ' And he was not ill a long time? He did not suf- 
fer any pain ? ' 
^ " ' No, Uncle Charles, not much. But, though he did 



154 CHILDREN IN FICTION 

not say anything, his face looked worse than scream- 
ing, and he passed away very stiff in his hind-legs. 
Oh ! ' (with a fresh outburst) ' when cook told me that 
her sister that was in a decline had gone, I never 
thought ' (sob, sob !) ' poor Vic would be the next.' " 



This is not the less heartrending for being 
amusing, and that short sentence "his face 
looked worse than screaming " is a master- 
stroke of realistic description. On the whole, 
for ordinary family purposes, Molly Danvers is 
one of the nicest little girls I know; and if we 
seek — as many people rightly seek — for the 
poetry, the beauty of childhood, subtly trans- 
ferred to paper, let us turn back a few years, 
and re-read for the fifth or the fiftieth time, as 
it chances, those seven delicious chapters of 
Qiiatre- Vingt- Treize^ which describe a single 
day in the lives of the three babies, Rene Jean, 
Gros Alain, and Georgette. How many hours 
must Victor Hugo have watched patientl)' and 
gladly the ways of little children before he 
could paint them with such minute and charm- 
ing truth, and what sheer delight is embodied 
in every line ! They do nothing remarkable, 



CHILDREN IN FICTION 1 55 

these tiny French peasants; they say nothing 
worth noting; they are clothed in rags; they 
are alone all day; they are mischievous, healthy, 
and natural. They hang enchanted, all three, 
over a wood-louse, their curls touching, their 
breath suspended, their eyes fixed on the em- 
barrassed insect: and we watch them with a 
joy and wonder equal to their own. '' It is a 
she - creature," announces Rene Jean, and 
Georgette laughs. Georgette who, at twenty 
months, has not yet acquired the art of con- 
versation. She utters a single word firom time 
to time, but sentences lie beyond her scope. 
She is occupied with grave thoughts, and when 
she breathes a soft monosyllable, her brothers 
pause encouragingly to listen. A belated bee 
comes buzzing in the window and departs. 

" ' She is going home,' said Rene Jean. 
" * It is a beast,' said Gros Alain. ' No,' said Rene 
Jean, ' it is a fly.' ' A f'y,' said Georgette." 

This is the extent of their conversational 
powers, and how very limited it seems. They 
do not talk, these babies; they act. They lay 
their destructive hands on the rare old folio of 



156 CHILDREN IN FICTION 

Saint Bai'tholomcw, and tear out the leaves 
one by one, solemnl)', innocently, conscien- 
tiously. Georgette, who cannot reach the vol- 
ume, sits on the floor, and tears each leaf into 
little pieces with painstaking amiability; and 
all three are so happy over their self-appointed 
task. By the side of their absolute uncon- 
sciousness, the Willie Winkles and Lord Faun- 
tleroys of romance grow suddenly Utopian and 
unreal. The chivalry, honor, generosit\% loy- 
alty, picturesqueness, and brilliancy, all the 
story-book virtues of story-book children, seem 
less winning and less dear than the birdlike 
contentment of three silent, sleepy little crea- 
tures, curled softly together, and painted by a 
master's hand. 



THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 

T T is a curious fact that three of the most 
-■- successful and eminent literary women in 
England — Miss Austen, Miss Edgeworth, and 
Miss Mitford — should have been typical old 
maids ; not merely unmarried through stress of 
intervening circumstances — ill health, early 
disappointment, or a self-sacrificing devotion 
to other cares — but women w^hose lives were 
rounded and completed without that element 
which we are taught to believe is the main- 
spring and prime motor of existence. To un- 
derstand how thoroughly this was the case, we 
have but to turn to a later and very different 
writer, Charlotte Bronte, who married when 
she was thirty-eight, and died one year after- 
ward, and whose whole literary life was ac- 
cordingly passed in spinsterhood. Yet if that 
very grave and respectable gentleman, the 
Rev. Mr. Nicholls, had never appeared upon 

157 



158 THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 

the scene at all, it would have been impossible 
to call Miss Bronte a typical old maid. She 
had the outward signs of one, indeed, the prim 
demeanor, the methodical habits, the sarcastic 
attitude toward the male sex ; but burning in 
every fibre of her being, and evident in every 
page of her writings, is that fierce unrest, that 
inarticulate, distressful longing of a woman 
who craves love. We can easily imagine 
Elizabeth Bennet, and the very sensible Elinor 
Dashwood, and even Emma Woodhouse, 
dearest and brightest of girls, slipping from 
their lovers' grasp and gro\\'ing into old maids 
as charming as was Miss Austen herself; but 
poor plain Jane Eyre, and that reticent little 
school-teacher, Lucy Snowe, arc shaken and 
consumed with the passion of their own desires. 
Such women cannot walk from the cradle to 
the grave, handling their lives with delicate 
satisfaction and content ; they must find what 
they need or die. 

It is amusing to note how the various critics 
and biographers of Miss Austen, Miss Edge- 
worth, and Miss Mitford have debated and 



THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 1 59 

fretted over the painful lack of romance in 
their careers. Feminine critics, especially, find 
it difficult to believe that there is no hidden 
tale to tell, no secret and justifiable cause for 
this otherwise inexplicable behavior ; and much 
time and patience have been exhausted in 
dragging shadowy memories to light. In the 
case of Miss Mitford, indeed, it seems quite 
hopeless to search for even the ghost of a love- 
story, and, although she certainly did devote 
her life with touching unselfishness to the com- 
fort and support of a very exacting father, it 
cannot for a moment be urged that, in so do- 
ing, she relinquished any distinct desire or 
prospe'ct of matrimony. Perhaps the exasper- 
ating qualities of her parent inclined her un- 
consciously to remain single ; for, with all her 
unsparing devotion, she must, in the course of 
sorely tried years, have grown to regard men 
very much as Dolly Winthrop regarded them, 
— *'in the light of animals whom it had pleased 
Heaven to make naturally troublesome." Mr. 
Mitford, a most genial and handsome old gen- 
tleman of the Turveydrop pattern, managed 



l60 THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 

to keep his daughter's hands full of work, and 
her heart full of love, and left her little chance 
or disposition for any wandering fancies. All 
the exuberant affection of her girlhood, all the 
mature attachment of later years, were concen- 
trated upon him alone. Her youth waned, her 
freshness faded, her indomitable courage and 
cheerfulness quailed a little before the ever- 
increasing burdens of her life ; but through it 
all, in joy and sorrow, no shadow of a suitor 
stands beckoning by her side. Her serene old 
age was haunted by no dim voices crying 
out of the past for the joy which had slipped 
from her grasp. She wrote love-stories by the 
score, always approaching the subject from the 
outside, and treating it with the eas)' conx'en- 
tionality, the generous }et imperfect s}-mpathy 
of a warm-hearted woman not prone to ana- 
l)'ze motives. They are very pleasant stories 
for the most part, sensible, health)', and happy ; 
but the)' are not convincing. The reader feels 
that if ?oll)' (lid not marr)' Joe she \\ould be 
just as well satisfied with William, and that if 
Edwin failed to win Angelina he would soon 



THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS l6l 

content himself with Dorothy. This is a com- 
fortable state of affairs, and doubtless true to 
life ; but it is not precisely the element which 
makes a successful love-tale. The fact is, Miss 
Mitford described things pretty much as she 
found them, not seeking to dive below the sur- 
face, and always adding a little sunshine of her 
own. She was a happy woman, save for some 
sad years of overwork, and her life was full of 
pleasant detail, of cherished duties, and of 
felicitous labor ; but, from first to last, love had 
no part in it, and, fancy free, she never reckon- 
ed of her loss. 

Miss Edgeworth, too, seems to have been 
lifted from the sphere of matrimony by the un- 
usual strength of her family affections. Her 
devotion to her father, to her two stepmothers, 
and to her nineteen brothers and sisters was of 
such an absorbing nature as to leave her little 
leisure or inclination for mere matters of senti- 
ment. She was so busy too, so full of pleas- 
ant cares, and successful work, and a thousand- 
and-one delightful interests ; above all, she 
clung so fondly to her home, and country, and 



l62 THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 

the familiar faces she had known from baby- 
hood, that love had no chance to storm her 
well-defended walls. When that handsome 
and earnest young Swede, he of the " superior 
understanding and mild manners," came to 
woo, he found, alas ! that the lad}"^ could not 
tear her heart away from Ireland and her 
beautiful young stepsisters to give it to his 
keeping. She acknowledged his merits, both 
his mildness and his superiority, she liked and 
admired him in every way ; but marry and go 
to Sweden ! — that she would not do, either 
for M. Edelcrantz or any other man. Mrs. 
Edgeworth, who was distinctly sentimental, 
and who would have been delighted to see her 
clever stepdaughter happily wedded, sa}s 
quite touchingly that Maria was mistaken in 
the strength of her own feelings ; that she 
really loved M. Edelcrantz, but refused to 
marry him because her family could not bear 
to part with her, because **she would not have 
suited his position at the court of Stockholm," 
and because she feared her lack of beauty 
would one day lessen his regard. Shadow of 



THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 163 

shadows ! Was there ever a woman who de- 
clined to marry the man she truly loved for 
such cloud-built reasoning as this ! Maria was 
doubtless the darling of her own home circle, 
and would have been sorely missed had she 
winged her flight to Sweden ; but there were 
daughters enough in that overflowing house- 
hold to admit of one being spared. As for the 
other obstacles, it is hardly possible that they 
should have been urged seriously by a woman 
as free from morbid sentiment as was Miss 
Edgeworth. There is a sweet humility which 
is born of love, and which whispers to most 
women — and, probably, to some men — that 
they are unworthy of the choice which has 
fallen upon them, of the jewel which has been 
flung at their feet. But to push this delicate 
emotion so far as to sacrifice happiness at its 
bidding is not the impulse of a sound and 
healthy nature. Miss Edgeworth could never 
have been pretty, and had spent most of her 
life in retirement ; but she was by no means 
unacquainted with the ways of the world, by 
no means destitute of womanly charms, and. 



164 THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 

above all, by no means without the exhilarat- 
ing consciousness of success. In fact, when we 
read her biography, we are principally im- 
pressed by the amount of adulation she re- 
ceived, by the extraordinary enthusiasm her 
pleasant tales aroused. The struggling novel- 
ist is tempted to \\'ish tliat he also might have 
lived in those halcyon days, until he remembers 
that a far greater writer, Miss Austen, had no 
share in this universal and unbounded ap- 
plause. Miss Edgeworth was as much the pet 
of the literary world as of her own household 
and friends. She had little need to doubt her 
powers, or to fear neglect and indifference. If 
she really regretted poor M. Edelcrantz — who 
went back to Sweden with a sore heart and 
never married anybody else — she gave no out- 
ward token of repentance, but li\cd to be 
eighty-two, the most cheerful and radiant of 
old maids, faithful to the last to her family 
affections, and happy to die in the midst of 
those who had made the sunshine of her life. 

It is in the case of Miss Austen, however, 
that truly strenuous efforts have been made to 



THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 165 

cultivate a passable romance upon scanty soil. 
Miss Austen was pretty, she was gay, she 
possessed an indefinable attraction for men, 
and she was in turn attracted by them, as a 
healthy-minded, happy-hearted girl should be. 
Her letters to Cassandra are full of amusing 
confidences on the subject — confidences far too 
amusing, in fact, to give any sign or token of 
genuine feeling beyond. She writes with 
buoyant cheerfulness about Mr. Tom Lefroy, 
for whom she '' does not care sixpence," yet 
prefers him to all other competitors, who must 
have ranked pitiably low in the scale. *'I am 
almost afraid," she confesses, *' to tell you how 
my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to 
yourself everything most profligate and shock- 
ing in the way of dancing and sitting down to- 
gether. I can expose myself, however, only 
once niore^ because he leaves the country soon 
after next Friday, on which day we are to 
have a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very 
gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young 
man, I assure you." 

Not without grave faults, though, it would 



l66 THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 

seem, for a little later we hear of a morning 
coat which is much too light to please Jane's 
critical eye. She cannot possibly give her 
maiden affections to a man who would wear 
such a coat, and so, after a while, he disap- 
pears from her pages and her life, to go out 
into the w^orld, and win much legal renown, 
and be Chief Justice of Ireland, and always to 
remember with great tenderness the gay 
young girl at Ashe. Then there appears on 
the scene that unnamed friend of Mfs. Lefroy's, 
whose love is so sudden and fervent that Miss 
Austen feels quite sure it will soon decline into 
" sensible indifference," as, no doubt, it does. 
Then the suitor wdio has " the recommenda- 
tion of good character, and a good position in 
life, of everything in fL\ct except the subtle 
power of touching my heart" — which seems to 
have been the real difficulty with them all. 
Sir Francis Doyle, indeed, tells a very pretty 
and pathetic tale of Jane x^usten's engagement 
to a naval officer who, after the peace of 1820, 
accompanied his fia)iccc and her family to 
Switzerland. Here he started off on foot one 



THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 167 

fine morning, promising to meet his friends at 
Chamouni. He never came, and they waited 
and waited with fast-growing fears, only to 
learn, when all was over, that the young man 
had been seized with a sudden fever, and had 
died, unknown and scantily cared for, in some 
poor cottage home. It is a sad story, but hap- 
pily does not rest upon any shadow of founda- 
tion. Miss Austen never was engaged, and 
never was in Switzerland; and although Sir 
Francis had the tale from a friend, who had it 
from a member of the family, it merely goes 
to prove that even relatives are not wholly in- 
capable of weaving romances out of thin air, 
rather than be, like the knife-grinder, without 
a tale to tell. 

Mrs. Maiden, Jane Austen's enthusiastic biog- 
rapher, discredits most unhesitatingly this par- 
ticular love-legend, while at the same time she 
manifests a lively desire to give form and color 
to another, scarcely less intangible. The third 
chapter in her little volume is enticingly head- 
ed '' Her Life's One Romance," and in it is nar- 
rated at some length the story of an attractive 



l68 THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 

young clergyman whom Jane and Cassandra 
Austen met one summer at a seaside resort in 
Devonshire. He openly admired the younger 
girl, and, when they parted, " impressed 
strongly on the sisters his intention of meeting 
them again." He died, however, shortly after, 
and Jane neither gave any outward token of 
grief, nor indulged in any confidences on the 
subject. Nevertheless, Cassandra, whose own 
youth was shadowed by the blight of a lost 
love, was wont to say, after her sister's death, 
that she believed this to have been her one 
and only romance; and Miss Thackeray, in 
her sympathetic sketch of Miss Austen, alludes 
very sweetly and very confidently to the tale. 
" Here, too," she says, ** is another sorrow- 
ful story. The sisters' fate (there is a sad 
coincidence and similarity in it) was to be 
undivided; their life, their experience, was the 
same. Some one without a name takes leave 
of Jane one day, promising to come back. He 
never comes back: long afterwards they hear 
of his death. The story seems even sadder 
than Cassandra's in its silence and uncertainty, 



THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 169 

for silence and uncertainty are death in life to 
some people." 

But if there is one thing more than another 
to be avoided and ruthlessly condemned, it is 
this quiet assumption that a woman has parted 
with her heart, when she herself has breathed 
no word to warrant it. The cheerful serenity 
of Jane Austen's daily life showed no ripple of 
storm, her lips told no tale; and why are we 
to assume that a young man whom she met for 
a few idle weeks and never saw again had 
broken down the barriers of that self-possessed 
nature, had overcome the gay indifference 
which showed no signs of hurt ? As for the 
popular theory that Anne Elliot's gentle en- 
during love and poor Fanny Price's hours of 
bravely borne pain were imaged from the 
depth of their author's experience, we have but 
to remember that the same hand gave us Har- 
riet Smith, with her fluctuating, lightly won 
affections, and Charlotte Collins, sensible and 
happy, enjoying her pleasant home, and en- 
during — or avoiding — her solemn, pompous, 
servile, stupid husband. As well connect one 



170 THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 

type as another with the genius that revealed 
them all. 

" Of Jane herself I know no definite love-tale 
to relate," says her nephew and biographer, 
Mr. Austen Leigh; and this seems about the 
conclusion of the matter. " No niaii s life 
could be more entirely free from sentiment,'' 
admits, very reluctantly, one of her cleverest 
critics. *' If love be a woman's chief business, 
here is a very sweet woman who had no share 
in it. It is a want, but \\c have no right to 
complain, seeing that she did not shape her 
course to please us." 

This is a generous reflection on the critic's 
part; but is the want so painfully apparent as 
ho thinks, or may we not be well content with 
Jane Austen as we have her, the central figure 
of a little loving family group, the dearest of 
daughters and sisters, the gayest and bright- 
est of aunts, the most charming and incom- 
parable of old maids } 



THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR 

'TT^HOSE persons are happiest in chis rest- 
-*- less and mutable world who are in love 
with change, who delight in what is new sim- 
ply because it differs from what is old; who re- 
joice in every innovation, and find a strange 
alert pleasure in all that is, and that has never 
been before. With little things as with big 
ones, this sentiment is the sentiment of our 
day. '* Unrest," says Schopenhauer, " is the 
mark of existence," and the many trifling de- 
tails of ordinary life evince on every side the 
same keen relish for novelty, the same careless 
disregard of the familiar. Especially is this 
the case with women, who feel less wistfully 
than men the subtle charm of association, and 
who have less sympathy than men for the dear, 
faulty, unlovely, well-loved things of their 
youth. No woman could have written those 
pathetic lines of Mr. Lang's on St. Andrews: 

" A little city, worn and gray," 
171 



172 THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR 

the memory of whose rainwashed, desolate 
streets blots out from his mind all the beauty 
and the splendor of Oxford. And — to descend 
from serious to friv^olous subjects — no woman 
can wholly appreciate that pleasant sketch of 
Mr. Barrie's, called "My Tobacco Pouch," 
which reveals a mental condition absolutely 
inexplicable to the most astute feminine appre- 
hension. It is the instinctive desire of our sex 
for modernism that keeps rolling the great ball 
of trade. Manufacturers and shopkeepers would 
starve in common if they catered only to men, 
who not infrequently have a marked prefer- 
ence for the archaic. But women, to use the 
words of Sir Thomas Browne, are " complex- 
ionally prepense to innovation." With won- 
derful pliancy and adaptability they fit easily 
into new surroundings, make homes out of 
new houses, fill their rooms \\'ith new objects, 
and grasp a fair share of happiness in the en- 
joyment of novelty in every form, whether of 
fashion, art, literature, religion or philanthropy. 
But what of the unfortunate few who, 
through some strange moral twist, are " com- 



THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR 173 

plexionally prepense" to sameness; who feel a 
passionate regret for what has been lost, and a 
passionate reluctance to part with what is fast 
slipping away; and who, as the great world 
rolls relentlessly on its appointed course, find 
themselves "forever broken on the wheel of 
time " ? The journal of that stout old Tory, 
Sir Francis Doyle, betrays a strong dislike, 
not only for political upheavals, which are 
very uncomfortable and disturbing things, but 
for innovations of any kind. '* Nothing can be 
so good as what is old," says Mr. Lang; and 
Mr. Peacock tranquilly declares that all the 
really valuable opinions have been uttered a 
thousand years ago. Amid the noisy blare 
with which the trumpets of progress herald 
every move, comes thrilling now and then a 
note of protest from some malcontent who 
does not part so easily with the past, and for 
whom familiarity lends to every detail of life a 
merit and beauty of its ow^n. It almost seems 
as if two-thirds of mankind were hard at 
work improving away the happiness of the 
remaining third, and bidding them at inter- 



174 THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR 

vals to stop grumbling and appreciate the 
change. 

When it chances that these familiar details 
are associated in the mind with pleasures, 
early pleasures especiall}% the memory of 
which lingers \\ith the sweetness of honey, 
then the pain of parting with them is utterly 
disproportioned to their worth. I have never 
been able to understand how people can re- 
bind an old book, or reframe an old picture, if 
the book or the picture have been in any way 
dear to them for years. How strange and un- 
friendly these objects look in their new dress ! 
How remote they seem from the recollections 
hitherto aroused by their presence ! One of 
the minor grievances of my life is the gradual 
disappearance from the theatres of all tlic old 
drop-curtains I can remember since my child- 
ish da}'s. Perhaps the new curtains are better 
than the old ones — I hear persons say as much 
occasionall)-— but to me they are simpl}^ hid- 
eous, because their native ugliness is unsoft- 
cnct] by any gracious memory of those far-off 
nights when, feverish with delight. I sat star- 



THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR 175 

ing at the stretch of painted canvas, and antic- 
ipating all the joys that lay behind. There 
was no moment of transport equal to that 
which saw the slow ascent of the mystic veil, 
revealing inch by inch the enchanted scenes 
beyond; and I still believe that if I could be- 
hold once more those dear, familiar land- 
scapes, some portion of the old, lost pleasure 
would return. Three curtains are indelibly 
associated with these hours of supreme happi- 
ness; and I recall them all three now as the 
most beautiful pictures in the world. One — 
and this, I think, was the first I ever saw — 
represented an Italian view, with a lively vol- 
cano in the background, and, in front, a long- 
legged shepherd lad reclining on the marble 
steps of a fountain, while his flock loitered 
lazily around. Another displayed four stout 
and dropsical nymphs preparing for, or resting 
from, a hunt; this fact being adroitly intimated 
by the presence of some very long bows, and 
some very lean greyhounds. The third was a 
seaport town, with vessels lying in harbor, 
and a little terrace running to the water's edge. 



1/6 THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR 

on which terrace I have taken many a stroll in 
spirit, waiting for the wonders to come. Not 
that the waits were ever long in those van- 
ished days. On the contrary, the whole even- 
ing" flew by on wnngs of fire, and the only 
thought that marred my perfect felicity was 
the haunting consciousness that it would too 
soon be over. And the theatres were never hot, 
or stuffy, or draughty, when I was a child; 
and the lights were never glaring, but shone 
with a gentle radiance; and the chairs were 
softer than dow^n; and the music was noble 
and inspiring; and the actors w^ere men of 
genius; and the actresses were ravishingly 
beautiful; and the scenery was sublime; and the 
plays were wondrously \\itt)'; and the paste 
jewels were dazzling; and c/uiui w^'s unknown; 
and I never, never, ncvcr^ wished I had stayed 
at home. What new drop-curtain hides from 
me now the rapturous illusions of my youth } 

Another grievance, more palpable because 
less inevitable than the replacing of worn-out 
theatre properties with fresh ones, is the pas- 
sion of publishers for altering the covers of 



THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR 177 

their magazines. This is the strangest act of 
vandalism that an unholy zest for novelty 
ever prompted in the human bosom. Why a 
magazine cover is selected in the first place, 
remains, in most cases, an unfathomed mystery. 
It is seldom a thing of beauty, but, once asso- 
ciated with the agreeable visitor that every 
month brings some new tidings to our door, it 
acquires for us all the subtle charm of familiar- 
ity. Nothing can well be more stiff and un- 
graceful than the design of Blackwood; that 
wilted, conventional border, and that wreath 
of prickly Scotch thistles, defending rather 
than decorating the vignette of the founder, 

" With eyes severe and beard of formal cut." 

The whole cover seems to say, ''Stand off, 
rash mortal ! There is nothing here for you ! " 
Yet to lose it would be to lose an old, surly, 
faithful and long-tried friend. I sometimes 
feel that Blackzvood is not as readable as it 
was when I was a girl — it is the privilege of 
increasing years to think all magazines were 
better when we were young — but for that very 



I/cS THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR 

reason I am glad to greet the ancient thistles 
that alone remain defiant and unchanged. 

American publishers, however, are as de- 
lighted to offer their readers a new cover as a 
new story, and it is occasionally interesting to 
follow a magazine through all its outer vicissi- 
tudes. There was a time when Saint NicJiolas 
behaved like Harlequin in the pantomimic, 
slipping into fresh costumes with bewildering 
alertness and rapidity. TJic Century has adopt- 
ed a plan eminently fitted to confuse and dis- 
tress people who are in love with the familiar, 
and who have barely time to accustom them- 
selves to one of the picturesque )'oung women 
on its cover, before they are confronted \\ itli 
another. The only engaging and comforting 
thing about these rival damsels is their strong 
family resemblance. They are like tlie Aiir 
daughters of Doris, with faces " neitlier the 
same nor different, but as tliose of sisters 
should be." The wanton alterati(^ns in I far- 
pcr'' s Magarjiiic are none the less heartbreak- 
ing- for beincf so trivial. As well rob us of an 
old friend altogether as tamper with his abso- 



THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR 179 

lute integrity. No one can claim for Hai^per 
that its time-honored cover has any rare artis- 
tic quality, any of that subtle and far-reaching 
suggestiveness that we prize so wearily to-day. 
On the contrary, its little boys scattering roses 
into nowhere, and its preposterous child blow- 
ing soap bubbles on a globe belong distinctly 
to the cheerful school of Philistia, and are not 
burdened with meanings of any kind. That 
makes them so refreshing to our eyes; and be- 
sides I have always regarded them with sincere 
affection, because of the pleasure they afforded 
me in infancy. It was one of the unwritten 
laws of our nursery that, when a new magazine 
arrived, the old one passed into our possession. 
We painted all the pictures with water colors, 
and we cut out the little figures on the cover 
for paper dolls. Not the child straddling over 
the globe ! It was impossible to make any- 
thing out of him, owing to his uncomfortable 
position. But the lads in tunics we thought 
extremely pretty, especially the one in the 
right-hand corner, whose head was as round as 
a bullet. The left-hand boy had a slightly 



l8o THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR 

flattened skull, which destroyed his perfect 
symmetry, though we occasionally remedied 
this defect by leaving him a small portion of his 
basket, and pretending it was hair. Now, alas ! 
though the children still mount guard on their 
flower-wreathed pedestals, and still scatter 
their roses in the air, some unkind hand has 
wrought radical changes in their aspect. They 
have grown bigger, stouter, and their decent 
little tunics, so nicely drawn up over one shoul- 
der, have been replaced by those absurd float- 
ing draperies which form the conventional attire 
of seraphs and sea nymphs all the world over. 
Never was there such an unhappy transforma- 
tion. It is true that on the old cover o{ Bcntlcys 
Magar:inc — if we may trust the minute picture 
of it on the face of Littcll — the little figures 
with baskets were clad, or unclad, in these same 
airy rags. But this fact does not reconcile me 
at all. I never knew Bcutlcys boys, but I have 
known Harper s children all m\' life, and I can- 
not bear to see them shivering month after 
month in such ridiculous, inadequate sashes. 
What sort of paper dolls would they have made 



THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR l8l 

for well-bred little girls ? And why should 
they have been deprived of their only garment 
to gratify a restless taste for change ? 

Well, it is useless to complain, for around us 
on every side people are fretting, and have 
fretted for generations over the unloved mo- 
notony of their surroundings. "It is not given 
to the world to be contented," says Goethe; 
and while life can never hurry on fast enough, 
or assume phases new enough to please the 
majority of mankind, a few dissatisfied souls 
will always cling perversely to the things 
which they have known, and feel more keenly 
every year that all the vaunted delights of nov- 
elty and progress are but a poor substitute for 
the finer charm of the familiar. 



OLD WORLD PETS 

"\ T ZE have grown to be very narrow-minded, 
' ' very exclusive, and hopelessly unim- 
aginative in our choice of domestic pets. We 
love and cherish the dog, and we have a senti- 
ment, less universal but far more disinterested, 
in favor of the beautiful and cold-hearted cat. 
We keep canaries in gilded cages — and there 
the matter practically ends. A few rabbits in 
a hutch — which are never petted — an occasion- 
al parrot feared by its master and hated by its 
master's friends; a little song-bird imprisoned 
now and then, and slowly d}-ing of despair; 
these are instances, happily too infrequent to 
count very heavily in the scale. As a fact, 
many people value the dog and cat for their 
serviceable qualities alone; exiling the first to 
the kennel and the second to the kitchen, and 
liking both, as Miss Mitford confessed she liked 
children, "in their place" — meaning anyplace 
where she was not. 

« 

1S2 



OLD WORLD PETS 183 

But when we turn back to the past we find, 
or think we find, a very different state of affairs; 
an almost endless variety of little wild crea- 
tures, tamed by luxury and love. The dog- 
still holds his own, and we need look no fur- 
ther than the Odyssey to see, in the great 
hound Argus, the splendid sagacity, the un- 
swerving loyalty, which centuries have not al- 
tered or impaired. I have always wished that 
Argus could have had Sir Walter Scott, rather 
than the crafty Odysseus for a master. There 
is also a pathetic dialogue in Theocritus be- 
tween two old fishermen, who are so poor they 
may not even own a watchdog to guard their 
scanty spoils: 

"All things, all', to them seemed superfluity, for 
Poverty was their sentinel. They had no neighbor by 
them, but ever against their narrow cabin gently float- 
ed up the sea." 

Cats, too, were valued pets in former days, 
and probably found such easy domesticity 
more to their tastes than the burdensome hon- 
ors of Egypt. In fact, when the Egyptian cat 
was not living in -sanctified seclusion as the 



184 OLD WORLD PETS 

friend and favorite of Pasht, she was apparent- 
ly earning a laborious livelihood as a retriever, 
if we may trust a relic of Egyptian art in the 
British Museum, which shows us a magnificent 
animal carrying no less than three struggling 
wild fowls in her mouth and claws. But when 
Puss at last entered Greece and Rome, about 
the time of the Christian era, or perhaps a cen- 
tury or two earlier, it was simply as a plaything; 
and Mr. Pater in " Marius the PLpicurean " de- 
scribes very charmingly the snow-white beast 
brought by one of the guests to a Roman ban- 
quet, and purring its way among the wine-cups 
in response to caresses and coaxing words. 
Mrs. Graham R. Tomson, that most winning 
chronicler of the cat's vicissitudes and triumphs, 
has also told us in graceful verse the history of 
a Greek lover who loses his mistress because 
he dares not bring her from Egypt one of these 
coveted and mysterious creatures: 

" A httle Hon, small and dainty sweet, 
(For such there be !) 
With sea-grey eyes and softly stepping feet, 
She prayed of me. 



OLD WORLD PETS 185 

For this, through lands Egyptian far away 

She bade me pass; 
But, in an evil hour, I said her nay — 

And now, alas ! 
Far-traveled Nicias hath wooed and won 

Arsinoe 
With gifts of furry creatures white and dun 

From over-sea." 

In the Museum of Antiquities, at Bordeaux, 
there is a mutilated tomb of the Gallo-Roman 
period showing still the indistinct outlines of a 
young girl and her two pets ; a cat clasped — 
very uncomfortably — in her arms, and, at her 
feet, a dignified cock, which appears to be 
pecking viciously at poor pussy's drooping tail. 

The few allusions we find to the cat in later 
Greek poetry are hardly of a flattering nature. 
Theocritus makes the impatient Praxinoe, in 
his XVth Idyl, say to her handmaid, ''Eunoe, 
bring the water and put it down in the middle 
of the room, lazy creature that you are ! Cats 
like always to sleep soft," — quite as if it were 
disgraceful in them to enjoy their ease. The 
same passage is interpreted somewhat differ- 
ently, and in a still more uncharitable spirit by 



1 86 OLD WORLD PETS 

Mr. Matthew Arnold: " Eunoe, pick up your 
work, and take care, lazy girl, how you leave it 
lying about again ! The cats find it just the 
bed they like." At least we know, by this 
token, that Puss was an inmate — understood if 
not honored — of the Alexandrian household. 
Tlicre is also a dog ; for Praxinoe, on going 
out, bids Phrygia, the nurse, " Take the child, 
and keep him amused ; call in the dog, and 
shut the street door." 

Perhaps it was the very diversity of pets that 
so often brought the cat into disgrace. She is 
not wont to tolerate divided affections, and the 
old primitive, savage instincts are very strong 
within her little breast. Consequently, there 
comes down to us out of the past a bitter wail 
of lamentation from foolish mortals who seem 
to have forgotten what a natural and whole- 
some thing it is for one creature to devour an- 
other. Agathias, a poet of the sixth century, 
has left us two mournful epigrams upon a favo- 
rite partridge ruthlessly done to death by a 
swift-footed and hungry cat: 

" O my partridge! Poor exile from the rocks and the 



OLD WORLD PETS 187 

heath, thy Uttle willow house possesses thee no longer. 
No more dost thou rustle thy wings in the warmth of 
the rising sun. A cat has torn off thy head. I seized 
thy body and rescued it from his cruel jaws. Let the 
earth lie not too lightly on thee, lest thy enemy discover 
and drag thee from thy quiet grave." 

The second epigram is quite as disconsolate 
and more vengeful in its tone : 

"The domestic cat which has eaten my partridge 
flatters himself that he is still to live under my roof. 
No, dear bird, I will not leave thee unavenged, but on 
thy grave will I slay thy murderer. For thy shade, 
which roams tormented, cannot be quieted until I shall 
have done that which Pyrrhus did upon the grave of 
Achilles." 

As if these direful threats were not enough, 
Damocharis, a disciple of Agathias, follows up 
the case with a third epigram in which he be- 
wails the cruelty of the cat, and compares it 
with burning eloquence to one of Aktaeon's 
hounds, which devoured its own master. '* Here 
is a pretty pother about a partridge ! " protests 
M. Champfleury, with the pardonable irritation 
of one who is wont to deal leniently with the 
shortcomings of his favorite animal, and who 
fails to sympathize with this excess of grief. 



l88 OLD WORLD PETS 

Pet partridges, indeed, are hardly in accord 
with modern taste, which is apt to regard them 
from the same simple point of view as did the 
cat of Agathias. Neither is the sparrow a 
popular plaything as in the days when Lesbia 
wept inconsolably for her dead bird, and Catul- 
lus sang in silvery strains to soothe her wound- 
ed heart. With what generous sympathy the 
lover laments and calls on the Loves and 
Graces, and on all the fair youths of Rome to 
lament with him this shocking and irreparable 

loss : 

" Dead my Lesbia's sparrow is, 
Sparrow that was all her bliss, 
Than her very eyes more dear." 

How sombre is the picture he draws of the 
little petted creature that in life never strayed 
from the white bosom of its mistress, and that 
now must tread alone the gloomy pathway 
whence not even a bird may return. It is 
really heartrending to listen to his grief: 

" Out upon you and your power 
Which all fairest things devour, 
Orcus' gloomy shades! that e'er 
Ye took my Bird that was so fair. 



OLD WORLD PETS 189 

Ah! the pity of it! Thou 

Poor Bird! thy doing 'tis that now 

My Loved One's eyes are swollen and red 

With weeping for her darling dead."* 

Almost as pathetic, and quite as musical as this 
melancholy dirge, are some of the epigrams to 
be found in that charming volume of transla- 
tions from the Greek Anthology, which Lilla 
Cabot Perry has aptly entitled From the Gm^den 
of Hellas. Here we have graceful and tender 
verses dedicated to the memory of pet beasts 
and birds and insects, one of them, indeed, be- 
wailing the hard fate of a locust and a cicada, 
which, beloved by the same mistress, sleep, 
equally lamented, side by side : 

" Unto the locust, nightingale of fields, 

And the cicada, who was wont to drowse 
Through summer heat amid the oaken boughs, 
This common tomb the maiden Myro builds; 
And, like a child, weeps that she could not save 
These twain, her cherished playthings, from the 
grave. " 

What can be prettier than such a requiem sung 
by Leonidas, and breathing in every line a 

■^Translated by Sir Theodore Martin, 



190 OLD WORLD PETS 

scntinicnt half natural, half assumed ! We 
look back into the past, and smile, but with no 
unfeeling mirth, to see the tiny tomb witli its 
cold and silent inmates whose shrill, amorous 
music is hushed for evermore. Nor were the}' 
alone in their sad distinction, for on every side 
other deserving insects were as decorously in- 
terred, and as tunefully bewailed. The poet 
who mourned for the ** maiden Myro's " play- 
things, was fain to sing with the same ready 
sympathy and the same charming grace the 
praises of Phila,mida's pet locust, loved and lost: 

"What if small, O passer-by, 

Be this stone! 'tis mine you see. 
What if it you scarce descry! 
Philaenida gave it me. 

" Praise her that she held me dear, 
Me, her little locust, singing, 
Whether in the stubble here 
Or amid the bushes winging. 

" Two long years she loved me well, 
Loved my drowsy lullaby; 
Me e'en dead did not repel, 
As these verses testify." 

Another epigram by Mnasalcas bewails a 



OLD WORLD PETS I9I 

similar loss, and inclines us slowly to the pain- 
ful conviction that all Greece must have been 
in mourning for these short - lived insects, 
which, like poor Hinda's tantalizing gazelles, 
appear to have made a point of dying just when 
they had grown most dear. It is a positive re- 
lief to find Meleager dedicating his verses to a 
pet cicada which is still alive and enjoying its 
master's tender care : 

'* Cicada, you who chase away desire, 

Cicada, who beguile our sleepless hours. 

You song-winged muse of meadows and of flowers, 

Who are the natural mimic of the lyre. 

Chirp a familiar melody and sweet, 

My weight of sleepless care to drive away; 
Your love-beguiling tune to me now play. 

Striking your prattling wings with your dear feet. 
In early morning I'll bring gifts to you 
Of garlic ever fresh and drops of dew." 

There is an exquisite description in the first 
Idyl of Theocritus of a deep bowl of ivy w^ood, 
the gift of a goatherd to the singer Thyrsis, on 
which is carved, among other pastoral scenes, 
a boy weaving a locust cage while he guards 
the vineyard from the foxes. Just such a 



192 OLD WORLD PETS 

dainty toy he weaves as may well have been 
the habitation of those luxurious and thriee- 
favored insects, the petted captives of Myro 
and fair Phihenida: 

" Now divided but a little space from the sea-worn 
old man is a vineyard laden well with fire-red clusters, 
and on the rough wall a little lad watches the vineyard, 
sitting there. Round him two she-foxes are skulking, 
and one goes along the vine rows to devour the ripe 
grapes, and the other brings all her cunning to bear 
against the scrip, and vows she will never leave the lad 
till she strand him bare and breakfastless. But the boy 
is plaiting a pretty locust cage with stalks of asphodel, 
and fitting it with reeds; and less care of his scrip has 
he, or of the vines, than delight in his plaiting."* 

Kids and lambs are pastoral playthings 
which the rustic lovers of Theocritus delight in 
offering to their fair ones ; and in the Vth Idyl 
Comatus complains to I.acon that he has given 
a bird to Alcippe and won from her no kiss in 
return. Whereupon Lacon, in the true spirit 
of amorous boastfulncss, protests that he gave 
but a shepherd's pipe to his maiden, and sweetly 
she kissed antl caressed him. A great hound, 

* Translation of Mr. Andrew Lang. 



OLD WORLD PETS I93 

strong enough to strangle wolves, a mixing 
bowl wrought by the hand of Praxiteles, a ves- 
sel of cypress wood, a soft fleece from the 
newly shorn ewe, and a brooding ring-dove 
are among the presents offered by these shep- 
herds in generous rivalry at the shrine of love. 
But by far the most winning pet whose 
memory has come down to us enshrined in 
Greek verse is the little wildwood hare, cher- 
ished by a young girl, and sung by the poet 
Meleager. Gentler and more affectionate than 
Cowper's sturdy favorites, it shares with them a 
modest fame, a quiet corner in the long gallery 
of prized and honored beasts. To those who 
have loved Tiney and Puss from childhood, it is 
a pleasure to see by their side this shrinking 
stranger, this poor little overfed, much-caressed 
darling whose race was quickly run : 



" From my mother's teats they tore me, 
Little long-eared hare, and bore me. 

The swift-footed, from her breast. 
Phanium, soft-handed, fed me 
On spring flowers, and nourished me, 

Fondlmg in her lap to rest. 



194 OI^^ WORLD PETS 

"No more for my mother sighing, 
Feasting daintily, then dying; 

I by too much food was slain. 
And she buried me with weeping 
Near her house, that she, while sleeping, 
Me in dreams might see again."* 

On what smooth Elysian sward does this little 
Grecian hare sport with his English cousins ? 
Fed, perchance, by Persephone's white hand, 
they gambol for evermore by the deep waters 
of Oblivion; and the gray ghosts, flitting by, 
smile with sad eyes upon the nimble creatures 
who, shadows in shadowland, yet bear in every 
limb rich memories of woodland glade, and of 
the dear, life-giving soil of earth. 

* Translation of Lilla Cabot Perry. 



BATTLE OF THE BABIES 

A WARFARE has been raging in our 
•^^ midst, the echoes of which have hardly 
yet died sullenly away upon either side of the 
Atlantic. It has been a bloodless and un- 
Homeric strife, not without humorous side-is- 
sues, as when Pistol and Bardolph and Fluel- 
len come to cheer our anxious spirits at the 
siege of Harfleur. Its first guns were heard in 
New York, where a modest periodical, devot- 
ed to the training of parents, opened fire upon 
those time-honored nursery legends which are 
presumably dear to the hearts of all rightly 
constituted babies. The leader of this gallant 
foray protested vehemently against all fairy 
tales of a mournful or sanguinary cast, and her 
denunciation necessarily included many stories 
which have for generations been familiar to 
every little child. She rejected Red Riding 

Hood, because her own infancy was haunted 

195 



196 BATTLE OF THE BABIES 

and embittered by the evil behavior of the 
wolf; she would have none of Bluebeard, be- 
cause he was a wholesale fiend and murderer; 
she would not even allow the pretty Babes in 
the Wood, because they tell a tale of cold- 
hearted cruelty and of helpless suffering; 
while all fierce narratives of i^iants and o^rres 

o o 

and magicians were to be banished ruthlessly 
from our shelves. Verily, reading will be but 
gentle sport in the virtuous da}'s to come. 

Now it chanced that this serious protest 
against nursery lore fell into the hands of Mr. 
Andrew Lang, the most light-hearted and 
conservative of critics, and partial withal to 
tales of bloodshed and adventure. How could 
it be otherwise with one reared on the bleak 
border land, and familiar from infancy with the 
wild border legends that Sir Walter knew and 
loved; with stories of Thomas the Rhymer, 
and the plundering Hardens, and the black 
witches of Loch Awe ! It was natural that 
with the echoes of the old savage strife ringing 
in his ears, and with the memories of the dour 
Scottish bogies and warlocks lingering in his 



BATTLE OF THE BABIES I97 

heart, Mr. Lang could but indifferently sym- 
pathize with those anxious parents who think 
the stories of Bluebeard and Jack the Giant 
Killer too shocking for infant ears to hear. 
Our grandmothers, he declared, were not 
ferocious old ladies, yet they told us these 
tales, and many more which we were none 
the worse for hearing. *' Not to know them is 
to be sadly ignorant, and to miss that which 
all people have relished in all ages." More- 
over, it is apparent to him, and indeed to most 
of us, that we cannot take even our earliest 
steps in the world of literature, or in the shad- 
ed paths of knowledge, without encountering 
suffering and sin in some shape; while, as we 
advance a little further, these grisly forms fly 
ever on before. " Cain," remarks Mr. Lang, 
" killed Abel. The flood drowned quite a 
number of persons. David was not a stainless 
knight, and Henry VIIL was nearly as bad as 
Bluebeard. Several deserving gentlemen were 
killed at Marathon. Front de Bceuf came to 
an end shocking to sensibility, and to Mr. Rus- 
kin." The Arabian Nights, PilgiHins Prog- 



198 BATTLE OF THE BABIES 

rcss, Paul and Virginia — all the dear old nur- 
sery favorites must, under the new dispensa- 
tion, be banished from our midst; and the ris- 
ing generation of prigs must be nourished ex- 
clusively on Little Lord Fauiitlcroy, and other 
carefully selected specimens of milk-and-water 
diet. 

The prospect hardly seems inviting; but as 
the English guns rattled merrily away in be- 
half of English tradition, they were promptly 
met by an answering roar from this side of the 
water. A Boston paper rushed gallantly to 
the defense of the New York periodical, and 
gave Mr. Lang — to use a pet expression of his 
own — '* his kail through the reek." American 
children, it appears, are too sensitively organ- 
ized to endure the unredeemed ferocity of the 
old fairy stories. The British child may sleep 
soundly in its little cot after hearing about the 
Babes in the Wood; the American infant is 
prematurely saddened by such unmerited mis- 
fortune. " If a consensus of American moth- 
ers could be taken," says the Boston writer, 
" our English critic might be infinitely dis- 



BATTLE OF THE BABIES I99 

gusted to know in how many nurseries these 
cruel tales must be changed, or not told at all 
to the children of less savage generations. No 
mother nowadays tells them in their unmiti- 
gated brutality." 

Is this true, I wonder, and are our supersen- 
itive babies reared perforce on the optimistic 
version of Red Riding Hood, where the wolf 
is cut open by the woodman, and the little 
girl and her grandmother jump out, safe and 
sound .'' Their New England champion speaks 
of the "intolerable misery" — a very strong 
phrase — which he suffered in infancy from hav- 
ing his nurse tell him of the Babes in the 
Wood; while the Scriptural stories were appar- 
ently every whit as unbearable and heart- 
breaking. ''I remember," he says, "two chil- 
dren, strong, brave man and woman now, who 
in righteous rage plucked the Slaughter of the 
Innocents out from the family Bible." This 
was a radical m^easure, to say the least, and if 
many little boys and girls started in to expur- 
gate the Scriptures in such liberal fashion, the 
holy book would soon present a sadly mutilat- 



200 BATTLE OF THE BABIES 

cd appearance. Moreover, it seems to me 
that such an anecdote, narrated with admira- 
ble assurance, reveals very painfully the lack 
of a fine and delicate spirituality in the re- 
ligious training- of children; of that grace and 
distinction which are akin to saintship, and are 
united so charmingl}- in those to w horn truth 
has been inseparably associated with beauty. 
There is a painting by Ghirlandaio hanging 
over the altar in the chapel of the Foundling 
Asylum in Florence. It represents the Adora- 
tion of the Magi, and kneeling by the side of 
the Wise Men is a little group of the Holy In- 
nocents, their tiny garments stained with 
blood, their hands clasped in pra}'er; while the 
Divine Child turns from his mother's embraces, 
and from the kings' rich gifts to greet the little 
companions who have yielded up their spotless 
lives for him. Now, surel}' those lean, brown 
Florentine orphans, who have al\\a}'s before 
their eyes this beautiful and tender i)icture, ab- 
sorb through it alone a religious sentiment un- 
fclt by American children who are familiar 
only with the ugl)' and inane prints of Ameri- 



BATTLE OF THE BABIES 201 

can Sunday-schoois, in which I have known 
the Hne, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," to 
be illustrated by a man with a magnifying- 
glass in his hand. Possibly our Sunday- 
school scholars, being more accurately in- 
structed as to dates, could inform the little 
Florentines that the Innocents were not 
slaughtered until after the Magi had returned 
to the East. But no child who had looked 
day after day upon Ghirlandaio's lovely pic- 
ture — more appealing in its pathos than Hol- 
man Hunt's brilliant and jocund Triumph of 
the Innocents — could desire to pluck *'in 
righteous rage " that chapter from the Bible. 
He would have at least some dim and imper- 
fect conception of the spiritual meaning, the 
spiritual joy, which underlie the pain and hor- 
ror of the story. 

This reflection will help us in some measure 
to come to a decision, when we return to the 
vexed problem of nursery tales and legends. 
I believe it is as well to cultivate a child's 
emotions as to cultivate his manners or his 
morals, and the first step in such a direction is 



202 BATTLE OF THE BABIES 

necessarily taken through the stories told him 
in infancy. If a consensus of mothers would 
reject the good old fairy tales " in their unmit- 
igated brutality," a consensus of men of letters 
would render a different verdict; and such 
men, who have been children in their time, 
and who look back with wistful delight upon 
the familiar figures who were their earliest 
friends, are entitled to an opinion in the case. 
How admirable was the ** righteous rage" of 
Charles Lamb, when he wanted to bu}' some 
of these same brutal fairy stories for the little 
Coleridges, and could find nothing but the 
correct and commonplace literature which his 
whole soul abhorred! "Mrs. Barbauld's and 
Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about," 
he wrote indignantly to papa Coleridge, "and 
have banished all the old classics of the nur- 
sery. Knowledge, insignificant and vapid as 
Mrs. Barbauld's books convey, must, it seems, 
come to a child in the shape of knowledge; 
and his empty noddle must be turned with 
conceit of his own powers when he has learnt 
that a horse is an animal, and that Billy is 



BATTLE OF THE BABIES 2O3 

better than a horse, and such like; instead of 
that beautiful interest in wild tales which made 
the child a man, while all the time he suspected 
himself to be no bigger than a child." 

Just such a wild tale, fantastic rather than 
beautiful, haunted Chateaubriand all his life — 
the story of Count Combourg's wooden leg, 
which, three hundred years after its owner's 
death, was seen at night walking solemnly 
down the steep turret stairs, attended by a 
huge black cat. Not at all the kind of story 
we would select to tell a child nowadays. By 
no means ! Even the little Chateaubriand 
heard it from peasant lips. Yet in after years, 
when he had fought the battle of life, and 
fought it with success; when he had grown 
gray, and illustrious, and disillusioned, and 
melancholy, what should come back to his 
mind, with its old pleasant flavor of terror 
and mystery, but the vision of Count Com- 
bourg's wooden leg taking its midnight consti- 
tutional, with the black cat stepping softly on 
before ? So he notes it gravely down in his 
Memoirs, just as Scott notes in his diary the 



204 BATTLE OF THE BABIES 

pranks of Whippity Stouric, the Scotch bogie 
thcit steals at nii^ht into open nursery win- 
dows; and just as Heine, in gay, sunlit Paris, 
recalls with joy the dark, sweet, sombre tales 
of the witch and fair)- haunted forests of Ger- 
many. 

These are impressions worth recording, and 
they are only a few out of many which ma}' be 
gathered from similar sources. That which is 
vital in literature or tradition, which has sur- 
vived the obscurity and wreckage of the past, 
whether as legend, or ballad, or mere nursery 
rhyme, has survived in right of some intrinsic 
merit of its own, and ^^■ill not be snuffed out of 
existence by any of our precautionary or h}*- 
gienic measures. We could not banish Blue- 
beard if we would. He is as immortal as Ham- 
let, and when hundreds of }'ears shall have 
passed over this uncomfortably enlightened 
world, the children o( the future — who, thank 
Heaven, can never, with all our efforts, be 
born grown up — will still tremble at the blood- 
stained key, and rejoice when the big brave 
brothers come galloping up the road. We 



BATTLE OF THE BABIES 205 

could not even rid ourselves of Mother Goose, 
though she, too, has her mortal enemies, who 
protest periodically against her cruelty and 
grossness. We could not drive Punch and 
Judy from our midst, though Mr. Punch's der- 
elictions have been the subject of much serious 
and adverse criticism. It is not by such bar- 
barous rhymes or by such brutal spectacles 
that Ave teach a child the lessons of integrity 
and gentleness, explain our nursery moralists, 
and probably they are correct. Moreover, 
Bluebeard does not teach a lesson of conjugal 
felicity, and Cinderella is full of the world's 
vanities, and Puss in Boots is one long record 
of triumphant effrontery and deception. An 
honest and self-respecting lad would have ex- 
plained to the king that he was not the Mar- 
quis of Carabas at all; that he had no desire to 
profit by his cat's ingenious falsehoods, and no 
weak ambition to connect himself with the 
aristocracy. Such a hero would be a credit to 
our modern schoolrooms, and lift a load of 
care from the shoulders of our modern critics. 
Only the children would have none of him, 



206 15ATTLE OF THE BABIES 

but would turn wistfully back to those brave 
old talcs which arc their inheritance from a 
splendid past, and of which no hand shall 
rob them. 



THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT 

A GREAT deal of generous scorn has been 
-^ ^ expended of late years upon those old- 
fashioned novels in which the characters were 
given plenty to do, and did it with a supreme 
energy and passion, only possible, perhaps, 
within the enchanted precincts of fiction. Such 
stories, we are told, are false to life, which is 
monotonous, uneventful, and made up day by 
day of minute and tedious detail, small pleas- 
ures which are hardly recognizable as such, 
and grim vexations which can never be per- 
suaded to assume noble or heroic proportions. 
The truthful representation of life being the 
only worthy object of a novelist's skill, it fol- 
lows that his tale should be destitute of any in- 
cidents save those with which we are all famil- 
iar in the narrow routine of existence. We 

should be able to verify them by experience — 

207 



208 THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT 

to prove them, as children prove their exam- 
ples at school. 

To meet these current severities of realism, 
the advocates of a livelier fiction unite in sa}'ing 
a great many sarcastic and amusing things 
about the deadly dulness of their opponents; 
about the hero and heroine who, in tlie course 
of three volumes, " agree not to become en- 
gaged," and about the lady's subtle reasons for 
dropping her handkerchief, or passing a cruet 
at table. It may be hard work to build up a 
novel out of nothing, they admit, but we can 
only echo Dr. Johnson's words, and wish it 
were impossible. Where is the gain in this 
perpetual unfolding of the obvious ? What is 
the advantage of wasting genuine ability upon 
a task the difficulties of which constitute its 
sole claim to distinction ? 

But /s tlie so-called novel of character more 
difficult to write than the no\'el of romance .'* 
This question can be answered satisfactorily' 
only by an author who has done both kinds of 
work sufficiently well to make his opinion val- 
uable; and, so far, no such versatile genius has 



THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT 209 

appeared in the field of letters. If we may- 
judge by results, we should say that artistic la- 
bor is as rare in one school of fiction as in the 
other, and apparently as far out of the reach of 
the ordinary champion in the arena. It is easy 
enough to be analytic; but it is extremely hard 
to be luminous, or interpretative, or to know 
when analysis counts. It is easy to stuff a book 
full of incidents; but it is hard to make those 
incidents living pages in literature. After De 
Foe had led the way with Robinson Crusoe ^ a 
whole army of imitators wrote similar tales of 
adventure; but Robinson Crusoe is to-day the 
only shipwrecked mariner whose every action 
awakens interest and delight. Mr. Stevenson 
in The Black Arrow y and Mr. Rider Hag- 
gard in Nada the Lily, have given us stories 
rich in horrors which do not horrify, and ex- 
citements which do not excite. Mr. Stevenson's 
tale is one bewildering succession of murders, 
plots, hairbreadth escapes, bloody skirmishes, 
and perils by field and flood; yet a gentle in- 
difference as to which side wins is the only dis- 
tinct sentiment with which we follow the wind- 



2IO THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT 

ings of his narrative. Sir Daniel is a perjured 
villain; but it is with no stern sense of just ret- 
ribution that we see him fall under the fatal 
arrow. Master Dick is a stout young soldier; 
but where is the breathless attention with which 
we pursue every step of another young soldier, 
equally brave and quick-witted, Ouentin Dur- 
ward of Glen-houlakin ? Even Joan in her 
doublet and hose — a device dear to the heart 
of the romanticist — is almost as uninteresting 
as Joan in her petticoats; though perhaps the 
most striking scene in the book is that in which 
Dick endeavors with hearty good will to ad- 
minister a little well-deserved chastisement to 
the supposed boy, and finds himself withheld 
by some subtle apprehension of a secret he is 
far from suspecting. To compare T/ic Black 
Arrow with IvanJioe or Qucntiii Diirward 
is manifestly unjust. It is no shame to any 
man to be surpassed by Scott. But when 
we remember the admirable and satisfying 
events in Treasure Islan<i, or the well-sus- 
tained interest of Kidnapped, it seems in- 
credible that Mr. Stevenson, of all novelists, 



THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT 211 

should have succeeded in telling a lifeless story 
of adventure. 

As for Nada the Lily, its incidents are too 
monotonously painful to do more than distress 
the reader. I am inclined to think that a great- 
er number of people die in the course of this 
tale than in all the rest of English fiction, ex- 
clusive of Mr. Haggard's other novels. They 
die singly, in pairs, in groups, in armies, in 
whole tribes. They die in battle, by fire, by 
torture, by starvation, at the hands of pitiless 
slaughterers, and under the fangs of ghost 
wolves. They die for every imaginable cause, 
and under every conceivable circumstance. To 
keep the death-rate of such a story would be 
like keeping the death-rate of the Deluge. 
There is the same comprehensive and all-em- 
bracing destruction. This maybe true to Zulu 
history — in fact, Mr. Haggard tells us as much 
in his preface to '' Nada," and few people are 
in a position to dispute the point; but it is rad- 
ically false to art, and impairs the natural vig- 
or of the tale. While one tragedy may be som- 
bre and impressive, a dozen are apt to be fa- 



212 THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT 

tiguing, and half a hundred border closely on 
the burlesque. Chaka, " a Napoleon and Ti- 
berius in one," reminds the irreverent reader ir- 
resistibly of the Queen in A /ice in WoJiderlatid, 
who is all the time saying," Off with his head ! " 
and ordering everybody to execution; the only 
difference being that the Queen's victims turn 
up blandly in the next chapter, and Chaka's 
never reappear. He it is who slays Unandi 
his mother, Baleka his wife, all his children 
save one, all his enemies, and most of his 
friends. Then his turn comes — and none too 
soon — to be murdered, and Dingaan his broth- 
er, *' who had the fierce heart of Chaka without 
its greatness," sets to work systematically to kill 
everybody who chances to be left. By the time 
he, too, is flung over the cliff to die, Mopo and 
Umslopogaas alone survive; the first because he 
has to tell the tale — after which he promptly ex- 
pires — and the second because he has already 
been slain in battle during the progress of an- 
other story. The most curious thing about this 
wholesale devastation is that Mr. Haggard ap- 
parently deplores itas much as the rest of us. " It 



THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT 213 

would have been desirable to introduce some 
gayer and more happy incidents," he admits in 
his preface, ' ' but it has not been possible!' Why 
has it not been possible, we wonder ? It is the 
privilege of a novelist to select or discard ma- 
terial according to his good judgment. He is not 
writing a history; he is telling a story. He is 
not chronicling events ; he is weaving a romance. 
He is an artist, not a recorder; and in the 
choice as well as in the use of material lies the 
test of unblemished art. 

What, then, is the vital charm which makes 
the novel of incident true literature — the charm 
possessed by Dumas, and Fielding, and Sir Wal- 
ter Scott } Mr. Birrell, who is always in love 
with plain definitions, says that if a book be 
full of *'inns, atmosphere, and motion," then it 
is a good book, and he asks no more. Mr. 
Lang, who shares this hearty sympathy for ac- 
tion, acknowledges that the best results are of- 
ten obtained by the simplest machinery. ** Du- 
mas," he declares, '' requires no more than a 
room in an inn, where people meet in riding- 
cloaks, to move the heart with the last degree 



214 THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT 

of pity and terror." Scott handles incident 
with the matchless skill of a great story-teller. 
He shows the same instinctive art in his situ- 
ations that a great painter like Rembrandt 
shows in his grouping. Every figure falls so 
inevitably into his right place that it is impos- 
sible for us to imagine him in any other. Henry 
Bertram's return to EUengowan is one of the 
most artistic and charming scenes in fiction, 
though it is described with such careless sim- 
plicity. Perplexed and fascinated by the child- 
ish memories tugging at his heartstrings, the 
young laird gazes at his ancestral home, and 
listens with rapture — which we share — to the 
fragment of a long-forgotten yet familiar song: 

" Are these the Links of Forth," she said, 
" Or are they the crooks of Dee, 
Or the bonnie woods of Warroch-head, 
That I so fain would see ?" 

There may be people who arc in no way 
moved by this home-coming, and who feel no joy 
when Queen Mary's boat glides over the dark 
waters of Lochlevcn, and no horror at that ill- 
omened churchyard gossip which ushers in the 



THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT 21 5 

dreadful wedding of Lammermoor. I do not 
envy them their composure; but what of King 
Louis's visit to the Duke of Burgundy in 
Quentin Durward, a situation so tense with 
passion that the least imaginative reader may 
well tremble at the possibilities of every min- 
ute ? What of the sacking of Liege, the siege 
of Front de Bceuf's castle, the trial of Rebecca, 
the battle of Bothwell Bridge ? He who could 
carry a chilly indifference through such narra- 
tives as these would not care if Shylock gained 
his suit, or King Harry lost the field of Agin- 
court. I doubt if he would really care whether 
Hector or Achilles won the fight. 

The casual incidents of life, the trivial possi- 
bilities of every day, are treated by Dickens 
with extraordinary humor and skill ; witness 
David Copperfield's journey to Dover, and 
Oliver Twist's first introduction to Fagin's den. 
But his great situations are apt to be theatrical 
rather than dramatic. It is not often that he 
reaches the sombre strength and passion of 
that memorable scene where the convict re- 
veals to Pip the secret of his mysterious wealth. 



2l6 THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT 

I do not know whether a great many people 
read Bulwer's novels nowadays. They belong 
to a past generation, which perhaps was luckier 
than the present. But I do know that the res- 
cue of Glaucus from the arena was an epoch in 
my childhood, and the cry of joy that rings 
from Nydia's lips rang in my heart for years. 
I have an inexpressible tenderness now for 
The Last Days of Pompeii, because of the pas- 
sionate suspense with which I read it when I 
was a little girl, and the supreme gasp of relief 
with which I hailed the arrival of Sallust and 
Calenus, while the lion crouches trembling in 
his cage. It is not easy to criticise a book 
linked with such vivid memories, and perhaps 
it is the association with early pleasures which 
gilds for many of us the beguiling pages of ro- 
mance. '* We are all homesick, in the dark 
days and black towns, for the land of blue 
skies and brave adventures in forests, and in 
lonely inns, on the battle-field, in the prison, 
on the desert isle." It is useless, and worse 
than useless, to dispute over the respective 
schools of fiction, instead of gladly enjoying 



THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT 21/ 

that which we like best ; and there are different 
kinds of enjoyment for different kinds of work. 
For my part, the good novel of character is 
the novel I can always pick up ; but the good 
novel of incident is the novel I can never lay 
down. 



GHOSTS 

f^ HOSTS enjoy a curious popularity in Eng- 
^-^ land to-day. Years ago they fell into 
unmerited disfavor; and for a century and a 
half they battled with scant success against that 
arrogant wave of reason and common sense 
which chilled the fair fields of poetry, swept 
romance from the land, and left the sombre 
glades of superstition tenantless and bare of 
every horror. From time to time, indeed, the 
exiled ghosts, like the exiled gods of Olympos, 
strove to regain their lost ascendency ; but 
there was something pitifully vulgar about 
their trivial triumphs. Apparitions whose mod- 
est mission was to sell a volume of dull sermons 
upon death, or to stir up a clamorous mob in 
Cock Lane, could scarcely aspire to a dignified 
position in the spirit world. Even their local 
coloring, though it lent them a transient estima- 
tion with the public, told against them in the 

218 



GHOSTS 219 

end ; for the city streets, and that highly 
vaunted bulwark of the nation, the great re- 
spectable middle class, are not harmonious 
accessories of the supernatural. As for the 
educated people, who now reverently await each 
new development of the impossible, theirs was 
a different attitude one hundred years ago. 
Men who read Pope and Swift and Addison, 
whose heads were clear, whose hearts were 
cold, whose faith was limited, and whose diges- 
tions defied high living, could ill attune their 
minds to the '' dark sweet horror " of mediaeval 
ghost lore. " The Deevil never appears to a 
man that 's no frichtened aforehaun out o' his 
seven senses," says the Ettrick Shepherd ; and 
he lived in Scotland, where skepticism failed to 
attain the easy supercilious composure of her 
English sister; in Scotland, where the exiled 
fairies and witches shared with the exiled Stuarts 
the just affections of a loyal race. 

There is little doubt that Sir Walter was 
secretly enamored of the superstitions which 
he affected to disregard, and which the stupid 
prejudices of his day would not permit him to 



220 GHOSTS 

enjoy in peace. What can be more pathetic 
than the contrast between his robust denials 
and his quick, half-smothered sympathy for 
all eerie things? How well he tells the tale 
of the apparition seen by Lord Londonderry, 
— the naked child who emerged from the dying 
embers of the grate, and who, like Faust's terri- 
ble hound, increased in size as he approached 
the curtained and recessed bed. Lord London- 
derry, Scott explains somewhat peevishly, was 
the only man he knew to whom a veritable 
ghost had ever appeared, and he is burdened 
with the conviction that it may be his duty to 
offer some explanation of the mystery. As 
for the supernatural element in his novels, it is 
almost always a failure; not from lack of im- 
agination or of vivid power, for the mingled 
horror and humor and pathos of " Wandering 
Willie's Tale '"have never been surpassed, but 
because the atmosphere in which he lived was 
unfavorable to the full development of such 
lawless fancies. The White Lady of Avenel 
is one of the tamest spirits in all fiction. Good 
Protestants may have rejoiced in the sound- 



GHOSTS 221 

ness of her religious principles ; but it is not 
the place of apparitions to be progressive and 
enlightened. If they know what is best for 
them, they will cling to the old order, for when 
it passes away it takes their strongest con- 
stituency along with it. I sometimes fear that 
modern ghosts are being lured to their destruc- 
tion by the new semi-scientific methods of 
research, which beguile them with a show of 
respect and a little worthless notoriety, but 
which in the end will rob them of their heritage, 
— that shadowy power which has come down 
from the dim past to be bartered away at last, 
like Esau's birthright, for a mess of pottage. 

If proof were wanted of the low estate to 
which the English eighteenth-century ghosts 
had been reduced, it might be found in the 
spasmodic efforts made to win them a place in 
literature. That Walpole, of all men in Chris- 
tendom, should have attempted this, is one of 
those pleasant ironies which cheer the humor- 
ist's path. That educated adults should have 
read The Castle of Otranto with little thrills 
of horror helps us to understand what otherwise 



222 GHOSTS 

would be a hopeless mystery, — the amazing 
popularity of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels. We are 
required to believe, on excellent authority, that 
when the newly printed Mysteries of UdolpJio 
appeared in quiet country homes, it was literally 
torn to pieces, so that each eager member of the 
household could seize a portion without unnec- 
essary delay. Thousands of young women 
lived, like Catherine Morland, in a delightful 
atmosphere of gloom and excitation, whispering 
by candle-light, with bated breath, of dungeons 
and black-robed messengers of evil, and awful 
secrets forever on the tantalizing verge of reve- 
lation. Yet Mrs. Radcliffe never got beyond 
the bare machinery, the stage-work and scaffold- 
ing of mystery. Her novels are as much akin 
to the terrible tales of Germany as are the 
frolicsome apes and witches of Mr. Irving's 
Faust to Goethe's ministers of sin. What is 
there in all the endless pages of UdoIpJio 
to compare with that single incident in the 
story of Pretty Annerly when the child goes 
with her grandmother to the house of the heads- 
man, and the great hidden sword, by which she 



GHOSTS 223 

is destined to die, is heard stirring uneasily in 
the cupboard ? Annerl, believing it to be an 
animal, is frightened, and begins to cry ; but the 
headsman knows for what drink the sword is 
thirsting, and begs the grandmother to allow 
him to cut the little one's neck very gently, so 
that a few drops of blood may be drawn, and the 
weapon be appeased. To this excellent advice 
the old woman refuses to listen ; and the sword 
bides its time until the inevitable hour when 
Annerl, grown into unhappy womanhood, is 
brought upon the scaffold to die. 

In this simple tale there is that element of 
horror which is the birthright of German fiction. 
Truly has Heine observed that his is the moth- 
erland of superstition, the favored home of all 
that is fanciful, and terrifying, and unreal. 
*'You French," he writes, — before the days 
of Maupassant, be it remembered, — "must see 
for yourselves that the horrible is not your 
province, and that France is no fit home for 
ghosts of any kind. When you call upon them, 
we must needs smile. Yes, we Germans, who 
remain serious at your most pleasant witticisms, 



2 24 GHOSTS 

we laugh all the more heartily at your ghost 
stories. For your ghosts are al\va}'s French- 
men, and French ghosts, — what a contradic- 
tion in terms! In the word 'ghost' there is 
such a suggestion of loneliness, surliness, and 
silence. In the word * French ' there is so 
much that is social, witty, and prattling. How 
could a Frenchman be a ghost, or how could 
ghosts exist in Paris?" 

They have existed, however, in England, and 
even in London, for a good many centuries; 
and bid fair to exist for as many more, if they 
are not decoyed out of their seclusion by unwise 
notoriety and attentions. In China and Japan, 
Mr. Lang assures us, ghosts do not live a " hole- 
and-corner" life; but come boldly forward, and 
play their parts in the business and pleasures 
of society. This is the example which English 
apparitions are being urged daily to follow, and 
this is the behavior which their modesty and 
native conservatism have hitherto conspired to 
forbid. It is easy for Japanese ghosts to assume 
definite duties in the world. They know pre- 
cisely what is expected of them. The " well- 



GHOSTS 225 

and-vvater " spectre, an inert shapeless thing, all 
slimy and limp and white, haunts the drinking- 
fountains, and peers malignly from the cold un- 
ruffled depth. The " chink-and-crevice " bogie 
takes upon itself the congenial task of dropping 
on you from some dark corner of the ceiling, 
and strangling you in its serpent-like embraces. 
The pale, shadowy larva that rises, uncoiling 
like a mist-wreath, from the grave, never deserts 
the burying-place which is its congenial home. 
The bestial vampire, glutting itself with blood, 
crawls forever amid the desecrated tombs. 
These unpleasant creatures, and many more 
as bad, have had their especial privileges and 
their especial lines of labor marked out for 
generations, and they adhere steadfastly to their 
posts. But the trouble with English phantoms 
seems to be that they have not yet learned what 
they are good for, and their miserable vagueness 
of purpose is the most disappointing and dis- 
heartening thing about them. " The modern 
ghost," complains an irascible critic, '' appears, 
nobody knows why. He has no message to 
deliver, no secret crime to reveal, no appoint- 



226 GHOSTS 

ment to keep, no treasure to disclose, no com- 
missions to be executed, and, as an almost 
invariable rule, he does not speak, even if you 
speak to him." 

Nevertheless, in this utilitarian age, his pop- 
ularity is ever on the increase, and there are 
plenty of enthusiasts who think they will yet 
overcome his silence, and persuade him to as- 
sume a more rational line of conduct. He has 
friends in every class of life who ardently desire 
his confidence, and who, in brief moments of 
self-deception, are prepared to think they have 
received it. Far back, in 1584, that devout 
writer, Reginald Scott, author of the Discovery 
of Witchcrafts ventured to ask with somewhat 
premature triumph, '* Where are the soules that 
swarmed in times past? Where are the spirits? 
Who heareth their noises? Who seeith their 
visions?" To which last questions Mr. Lang 
makes prompt answer for the nineteenth cen- 
tury: ** Protestant clergymen, officers in the 
army, ladies, land-agents, solicitors, representa- 
tives of all classes except the Haunted House 
Committee of the Psychical Society." Fashions 



GHOSTS 227 

have changed since people sneered a little even 
at Dr. Johnson because he stoutly persisted in 
fearing ghosts, if not in believing in them all his 
life. We are beginning now to remember every- 
thing that has been said, and well said, in favor 
of such fear. We are beginning to acknowl- 
edge that what universal reason proudly denies, 
universal apprehension tremblingly admits. We 
read with pleasure Shelley's modest words, writ- 
ten, it is true, after an evening profitably spent in 
listening to some of the most ghostly tales that 
*' Monk " Lewis and Lord Byron could relate. 
" I do not think," muses the poet in the solitude 
of his bed-chamber, " that all the persons who 
profess to discredit these visitations really dis- 
credit them ; or, if they do in daylight, are not 
admonished by the approach of loneliness and 
midnight to think more respectfully of the 
world of shadows." 

This is candor itself, and Shelley was singu- 
larly fitted for such " melancholy, pleasurable 
fear," because he possessed in an unusual de- 
gree that extreme sensitiveness to surround- 
ings which is a proper attribute both of the poet 



228 GHOSTS 

and the ghost-seer. " Certain dark gardens cry- 
aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand 
to be haunted ; certain coasts are set apart for 
shipwreck," says Mr. Robert Louis Stev^enson ; 
and Burns condenses the same thought into 
that incomparable line, " ghaist-alluring edi- 
fices." No one can read the fragment of 
Shelley's Speculations on MctapJiysicSy in which 
he describes the subtle horror which thrilled 
him at sight of an ordinary and well-remem- 
bered landscape, without recognizing the close 
connection which existed for him between the 
seen and the unseen, between the supernatural 
element and its supremely commonplace set- 
ting. It was while walking with a friend near 
Oxford that he suddenly came upon a bit of 
country familiar to him in dreams, and associated 
with half painful, half terrible emotions. 

"The view consisted of a windmill, standing in 
one among many plashy meadows, inclosed with stone 
walls ; the irregular and broken ground between 
the wall and the road on which we stood ; a long 
low hill l)ehind the windmill, and a gray covering of 
uniform cloud spread over the evening sky. It was 



GHOSTS 229 

that season when the last leaf has just fallen from the 
scant and stunted ash. The scene surely was a com- 
mon scene ; the season and the hour little calculated 
to kindle lawless thought. It was a tame, uninterest- 
ing assemblage of objects, such as would drive the 
imagination for refuge in serious and sober talk to the 
evening fireside, and the dessert of winter fruits and 
wine." 

Yet this quiet English landscape, with its 
dull monotony of tint and outline, awoke within 
the poet's breast such bewildering sensations of 
terror that he lacked the courage to describe 
them, and Mary Shelley affirms that the mere 
recollection of those fearful moments agitated 
him beyond control. The most curious cir- 
cumstance in the case is the presence of the 
windmill, that homely and friendly little build- 
ing, which, for some inexplicable cause, carries 
with it, in every land, an unwarranted flavor of 
ghostliness. Heine was quick to recognize its 
uncanny attributes, and shivered when he saw 
the slow arms turning softly in the twilight, or 
standing, stiff and spectral, under a starlit sky. 
Sir Walter Scott, who was less sensitive than 
most men to impressions of this order, confesses 



230 GHOSTS 

in his journal that from childhood he had secretly- 
feared a mill, even those cheerful, noisy mills 
where the great wheels revolve briskly to the 
sound of rushing water ; and that the sight of one 
at sunset filled him with uneasiness and gloom. 
In the north, mills are not only the chosen 
haunt of witches, but have familiars of their 
own, the mill-goblins who hold the wheels still 
in the water with their strong bony hands ; and 
Asbjornsen, in Round the Ytde-Log, tells us 
that he tried vainly to induce a peasant lad to 
remain with him in one overnight. " My mother 
has often told me that there are evil spirits 
dwelling in these mills," said the prudent boy, 
and declined all risk of their companionship. 

In truth, the terrible ghosts and demons of 
the north are not helpless, harmless, speechless, 
purposeless creatures, to be courted and coddled 
like English drawing-room apparitions. Their 
hands can strangle and slay; their strength is 
greater than the strength of men ; their wills 
are evil always ; their malignity can never be 
appeased. When overcome, they are to be 
dreaded still ; for, long ago, Grettir the Strong 



GHOSTS 231 

slew the Ghost of Glam, slew it manfully by the 
seashore, and hoped that peace had come mto 
his troubled life. But when the moonlight 
shone upon the sands, and Grettir looked on 
the creature he had killed, he beheld for the 
first time the horror of its awful eyes. Then 
fear seized him who before had never feared, 
and from that hour he dared not be alone at 
night, but trembled like a woman in the dark- 
ness, beseeching companionship and comfort. 
Even the Scottish spectres are stronger and 
more malign than their English cousins; and 
Mr. Lang, in his Angling Sketches^ tells us a 
ghastly tale of three Highland shepherds, who 
sat talking of their sweethearts in a lonely 
shelling, on Loch Awe, and wishing, each one, 
for the presence of the girl he loved. Suddenly 
the three young women entered, smiling, and 
two of the lads received them joyously, and 
went with them into dark corners of the hut. 
But the third, fearing he knew not what, sat 
quietly by the fire, and played on a little Jew's- 
harp. '^ Harping is good, if no ill follows it," 
said the semblance of his sweetheart angrily; 



232 GHOSTS 

to which the boy made no reply, but kept on 
playing steadfastly. In a few minutes he saw, 
trickling from one dim corner of the sheiling, a 
tiny stream of blood, and presently a second 
stream from the other corner joined it slug- 
gishly in the fire-light. Then he arose, still 
playing, and fled into the night, leaving his 
dead comrades in the embraces of the vampires 
who had worn so falsely the masks of familiarity 
and love. 

These are not spirits to be tamed by psychical 
research, and invited to make themselves at 
home in good society. There is not even a 
great deal gained by calling them, in the scien- 
tific language of the day, '* phantasmogenetic 
agencies," as if that elucidated the mystery 
or made them comfortable companions. It 
were better, perhaps, to remember Porphyry's 
warning that all ghosts and demons are by 
nature deceitful and fond of travesty. It were 
wiser to give heed to old Richard Burton, who 
knew more about such matters than a wilder- 
ness of scientists, and who assures us plainly that 
the most illiterate devil is an unsafe antagonist 



GHOSTS 233 

for the most learned man. It were true sagacity 
to fear the powers of evil rather than to patronize 
them. Faust is supercilious enough when Me- 
phistopheles first comes upon the scene, but he 
learns a little later on the ruthlessness of the 
spirit he has invoked. '' Ghosts are rare, but 
devils are plenty," says Cotton Mather, and in 
tracking the first we may stumble unaware upon 
the second. At its best, the companionship of 
spectres makes but a dubious surrounding in 
which to pass our days, even though we escape 
the stake and fagots which the stern conserva- 
tism of our forefathers provided as a barrier for 
such intercourse. The gift of second-sight was 
ever an unenviable as well as an unhallowed 
possession, and the man born to such a fatal 
heritage had scant cause to rejoice in his accom- 
plishment. '' It is certaine," says Kirk truly, 
'' he sie more gloomy and fearfuU things than he 
do gladsome ; " and the ever-present possibility 
of being burned as a warlock was hardly calcu- 
lated to enhance the cheerfulness of his visions. 
Cassandra's powers, it will be remembered, were 
neither soothing to herself nor serviceable to 



234 GHOSTS 

her neighbors. Theoclymenus had probably 
but scant appetite for the Odyssean banquet 
after he had seen the shrouds woven slowly 
around the doomed wooers. The old woman in 
Mr. Frazer's narrative who beheld a sailor boy 
" walking in his winding-sheet, sewed up from 
top to toe," besought in vain that the lad might 
be left on shore. Her words were unheeded, 
and the little fellow sailed away to his death; 
another instance of the futility of portents. The 
Scottish minister who, in i8i i, unwillingly con- 
fessed to having seen the corpse candles rise 
at night from the graves of two children and 
proceed to the house of their father, who died 
the following day, had especial cause for vexa- 
tion at his own inopportune testimony. For 
years he had preached against the wicked cre- 
dulity and superstitions of his parishioners, and 
it seemed hard that he, of all men, should have 
been selected by the ironical humor of the 
spirit world to be a witness of these uncanny 
and unwelcome manifestations. 

Search where we will, read what we may, we 
find little to warrant us in the belief that ghosts 



GHOSTS 235 

will ever develop into reasonable creatures, or 
that we shall ever succeed in piercing the mys- 
tery of their perverse and wavering natures- 
They do not change with the changing cen- 
turies. Our attitude towards them varies with 
every new current of thought, every successive 
tide of susceptibility or skepticism; but they 
are the same freakish and elusive phantoms 
that they were in the days of Thessalian magic 
or of Salem witchcraft. Mr. Lang, sifting the 
subject through the five hundred and fifty- 
seven pages of Cock Lane and Common- Sense, 
turning on it every light, and patiently explor- 
ing every avenue of approach^ comes at last to 
the conclusion that we know nothing at all 
about it, and are not in the least likely to find 
anything out. How one, reared in wholesome 
fear of the supernatural, and looking back upon 
a childhood of *' variegated and intense misery, 
recurring with especial vigor at bed-time," 
should have the hardihood to write so flippantly 
of ghosts and ghost-seers passes my compre- 
hension. ''We do not know the laws of that 
country," says Charles Lamb, and he who has 



236 GHOSTS 

ever trembled trembles still when loneliness and 
midnight bring him face to face with *' the terror 
that walketh in darkness." Stories may be 
amusing, and apparitions may lack every quality 
which a self-respecting and fear-inspiring ghost 
should possess. " Many of them," says Mr. 
Lang, reproachfully, ** have a perfect craze for 
announcing that bodies or treasures are buried 
where there is nothing of the sort." Many 
make no announcements, and appear to have 
no distinct notion of what they want, or why 
they are manifesting themselves. Many find a 
somewhat childish pleasure in moving furniture, 
or breaking the kitchen crockery. Many can 
do nothing but rap, and practice this solitary 
accomplishment with monotonous and purpose- 
less fidelity. And many more, like the fabulous 
esprit d' Orleans, have an unpleasant flavor of 
charlatanism and quackery. Yet our hearts 
confess to a survival of the old, unreasoning 
fear, the primitive emotions which centuries do 
little to efface. Long, long ago, in Greece, the 
dogs howled dismally when Hecate stood by 
the cross-ways; and even now her presence 



GHOSTS 237 

overshadows us, when we waken at night to 
hear the n^elancholy sounds. Long, long ago, 
the ghost of Caligula walked in the gardens of 
Lavinia; and superstition whispers to us even 
now that the troubled spirits which haunt the 
abodes of man are no friendly shades of de- 
parted mediocrity, but phantoms evil in every 
instinct, and linked with inexpiable crime. 



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